There are a few steps to starting any business. First, comes the idea, then comes the solid plan for profitability. And then in order to get the money flowing into your corner, there’s a thing called scaling: making things grow without working 24/7 to do so. With that in mind, here are five great ways to scale your ecommerce business.
1. Get the Word Out
It’s simple: if nobody knows you exist, nobody can buy from you.
So, one of the first things you’ll want to look at is coming up with a sparkling marketing strategy. We can’t list a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy because, well, one doesn’t exist.
What it ultimately looks like boils down to what your business consists of, where you ship from/to, who your audience is, and so much more. But in terms of generalities, you usually can’t go wrong with special offers/discounts/coupons/incentives.
2. Invest in Automation
This includes so many things, like not fulfilling items yourself anymore to using automated software for repricing and feedback.
Related: 15 Reasons Sellers Use Amazon Repricing Software
If you want to scale your ecommerce business, you’re going to have to source out the jobs you were doing yourself beforehand. The idea is to cut down on man hours spent doing these tasks that either software or someone else can do, and devote more time to the finer, more sophisticated nuances of your business.
Plus, automation has another neat perk: it delivers a consistent (re: professional) approach every time.
Related: 6 Great Reasons to Use Amazon Feedback Software
3. Put an Increased Focus on Customer Support
We want to make an amendment to the previous point.
Customer support should not be one of those things you fully automate, as the scaling process is when you want to keep a human touch on it. There’s a tendency to lose personalisation during the growing process and poor customer support is something that can hurt you immensely down the line, especially with consumers having so many options at their fingertips.
Your best bet is to combine automation with a personal bent so that buyers really feel like people, and not dollar signs.
4. Get Something Else to Fulfil Orders for You
This is partly under the umbrella of automation, but important enough to get its own paragraph. When you scale, you should stop self-fulfilment. It’s just going to eat up way too much of your time.
Consider how many steps you have to do yourself:
- Pick an appropriate-sized box or padded envelope.
- Pay for said box or envelope.
- Work in the price into the product’s cost.
- Make a shipping label and attach it.
- Find and select the item from the shelves.
- Wrap the item and put it into its box or container (oh, and buy packing material, too).
- Factor in cross-border tariffs into the product’s price.
- Take the time to go down to a shipping office, stand in line, tell the agent what you want then spend more time going back home/the office.
- Rinse and repeat, plus other miscellaneous stuff involved in fulfilment.
Repeat after me: self-fulfilment is not worth it.
Your eyes might get a bit wide when you see the overall cost of paying someone/something else to do it for you; but compare it to your projected revenue from scaling up and you’ll discover, it’s worth it!
Related: How to Hire a Virtual Assistant
5. Don’t Forget About Your Website
Whether you’re using Amazon or your own site, you don’t want to forget about your site for one second. It’s the first point of contact for many of your consumers, and first impressions are so much more important online than in person.
If something goes wrong, you won’t be able to tell by their body language and have a couple minutes to make things right. Instead, they’ll just click off and visit another site.
Keep your site free of grammatical errors, full of pretty, hi-res pictures, high on functionality and ease of use, and updated with all the promotions you’re currently offering.
Optimise Your Amazon Prices
Scaling up your ecommerce business means a lot of research and work ahead of you. But there’s one area you don’t have to Google for an answer: which repricer to use. That’s because RepricerExpress has an unbeatable combination of cost, simplicity, reach and power. And to make it even better, when you sign up now you get to sit back and relax with the first 15 days entirely free.
