As an online retailer, you will need to shift focus from maintaining the status quo to growing your ecommerce business. Don't be among the retailers that don't understand the importance of scaling.
When you launch your business, you need the right tools, operations and sales to scale growth. You will have to be prepared to engage your target customers. Your market penetration will be proportionate to your resources and capabilities. Increase in demand could be a boon for your business.
You may have to scale up operations to meet that demand. But that demand can turn against you. This happens when you don't understand the importance of scaling. You won't have the operational capacities to meet that demand. Poor customer experiences will accumulate, damaging your brand.
Scaling is more than improving what you've got online. Let's consider the importance of scaling your eCommerce business.
What Does It Mean to Scale?
Online retailers interested in sustaining their business must prepare to scale. If your business is successful, scaling allows you to keep up with the momentum. Ensuring your continued growth also prevents disaster. Scaling is more than optimizing your website for more traffic. You must consider operational and fulfillment solutions to help meet demand. You need to think about how you will delight all new types of customers as well.
You need to investigate solutions to support scaling ahead of time. This is a complicated task that you can't start at the arc of your growth. You will determine the solutions for you based on the unique aspects of your business. Most of all, you need to understand your customers. You may be tapping into a new segment of your target market. You may have new and unexpected customer types as well.
The Importance of Scaling in 5 Simple Steps
Your approach to scaling can be simple. The following steps guide you through the most important aspects of successful scaling. These will help you start the transition. It's up to you to fulfill them in a way that works best for your business.
Choose an eCommerce Platform
As a new business, you may be using a custom eCommerce platform. You might be using a basic account for enterprise software. Either way, your platform will determine how well you can scale to meet growing demand. Most enterprise platforms support scalability.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers payment options that scale alongside your business. You enjoy hands-on resources from Salesforce's team as well. Magento is another popular enterprise platform. Magento sells you the software itself. You can customize it and adopt technologies from Magento's open source community.
If those enterprise solutions are too rich for you, consider options like Squarespace. This is a simplified eCommerce model that works for businesses of all sizes. And if you really want a custom solution, try Drupal Commerce. Drupal is highly flexible, and you build it to scale yourself. Look at the individual pricing, features, and tools that go with each platform. Consider what you will be doing in five years before you make a decision.
Identify Your New Customers
You won't get far if you aren't adapting your business to new customers. The first step is understanding why they came in the first place.
To start, you must have analytics in place. Google Analytics is an easy way to begin. You can quickly identify entry points to your website and sales this way. What is resonating with your new customers? Which products are they buying?
The more data you have about customers, the better you can scale your marketing efforts.
A common mistake at this point is turning all focus on new customers. Abandoning your base customers will turn the tides against you. Consider how you can target and adapt your customer touchpoints to meet the demands of both.
Choose a Marketing Strategy
If you haven't done so, adopt an inbound marketing strategy. Start by building personas based on what you know about your customers.
You'll leverage these to engage with these customers later. You should have personas for all different types of customers. You will want to use the methods that work most often with each of these groups. Then, personalize experiences for each of them.
Draw them in with value as opposed to advertising. Offer them a partnership rather than sales alone. Then continue to delight them as they engage with your brand.
Choose Your Strategic Partners
Don't assume you can handle scaling alone. You may strain on your operational and fulfillment solutions. This is especially true if you're fulfilling your own orders.
A winning fulfillment partner will consolidate your fulfillment needs no matter your growth. It will optimize services and support more and more of your team members as you grow. It will also monitor product availability and prevent potential disasters.
You can partner with third parties for marketing and operational needs as well. Have available partners ready in case you must call upon them to scale more or keep up with demand.
Focus on Your Ecommerce Business, Not Just Your Website
Your website is a portal and a lifeline for your business. But you need to acknowledge yourself as a business most of all. Entrepreneur says, “Your eCommerce store is a real business, and it should be treated with the same respect that the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies treat theirs.”
Once your website is optimized, your business acumen must kick in. Your website is your sales portal, but there are many pathways to get there.
Engaging new customers through each of those channels is the next step. Soon you will move on from being reactive to changes in your existing market. You will target new customers and scale in alignment with your growth strategy. And you will find cost-effective solutions and partnerships to keep your growth curve headed upwards.
Fulfillment That Works for Growing Businesses
Sometimes the best solutions are simplest ones. Now that you understand the importance of scaling, you have an opportunity to start fulfillment right. Contact Dropified to learn more about scalability, powerful product research, and 1-Click solutions for your team.
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