Editorial
The Gist
- Understand customer data. Robust customer information management enables targeted upselling and customer segmentation for personalized communications.
- Optimize product management. Leveraging PIM software is essential for handling extensive product catalogs effectively and enhancing ecommerce operations.
- Streamline logistics. Developing a customer-centric shipping strategy and automating inventory management are critical for meeting consumer demands efficiently.
It is common knowledge for marketing and sales professionals that an ecommerce strategy in business is an opportunity for growth.
2024 statistics support that strong belief:
- Retail ecommerce sales are estimated to exceed $6.3 trillion worldwide.
- U.S. ecommerce sales represent 15.60% of retail sales.
- Over 26.5 million ecommerce sites operate worldwide.
Do You Want Your Share of This Growing Economy?
Well, you’d better make sure you consider every single aspect of this opportunity as statistics also reveal that up to 90% of ecommerce businesses fail, which leads us to 23.8 million e-shops failing.
And it is not about the technology, but more about the process behind the scenes.
Now, let’s do our homework before you speak to your manager or bank to invest this growing market!
Related Article: Digital Commerce Strategy: A Roadmap to Success
Top Things to Consider Building a Strong Ecommerce Strategy
1. Customer Information
The value of businesses is based on their assets, innovation process, market share, sales volume and more. One critical criterion is your customer database.
To take full advantage of it, you may ask yourself the following:
- Do I have the right information about my customers to be able to retarget them for up- or cross-selling opportunities?
- Which customer segments should I create to send the communications my customers want to know about?
- Is my customer data consistent across all sales channels (retail shops, social media), up to date and stored securely?
- Would I benefit from a CRM platform to manage my online business more efficiently?
If you can answer yes to all these questions, you can proceed here.
Related Article: 3 Steps to Integrate Digital Commerce Operations Into the Marketing Machine
2. Product Information
Managing product information is also key to your ecommerce strategy, especially if you have a large catalog, with numerous SKUs and variations and complex descriptions with many fields and media.
Although most professionals know about CRM platforms, only a small portion of managers or business owners know about product information management (PIM) software.
You have two options to manage your product information:
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3. SEO
We will not discuss SEO in detail, but let’s review the fundamentals:
- Is my domain name a good match for my brand name and SEO and user friendly?
- Do I have the right URL rewriting strategy?
- Do I have an https certificate?
- Do I have the right set of primary and long tail keywords for my content?
- Do I have optimized medias to reduce loading times?
- Do I have the right redirects if I am revamping an existing website?
If you can answer "yes" to those questions, you are good to move on to the next step.
And the good news is that you are safe with major ecommerce platforms as they are all built out of an SEO friendly structure.
4. Logistics and Shipping
As easy as it is to create an ecommerce website with platforms such as WooCommerce or Shopify, operations are not as stress-free.
The entire operations process should be carefully planned and structured to automate certain elements and satisfy demanding customer needs:
- Define a customer-oriented shipping strategy, from delivery options, shipping fees, incentives for upselling with free shipping and easy returns with pre-paid shipping.
- Define your online sales strategy, with a flexible refund, exchange and return policy.
- Automate inventory management to avoid stockouts.
- Create a connection with your logistics partner to reduce manual work.
Customers are demanding and hard to please when it comes to getting their product in the best possible delivery times.
Related Article: Transforming Ecommerce With Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
5. Last but Not Least: Payment
Out of seven key factors influencing online shoppers' decision-making, fear of bank transactions ranks first.
When you decide which payment methods you will enable, you may consider the following:
- Convenience for buyers (for example Apple Pay processed only 12.6% of all online consumer payments but makes transactions easier, which might reduce abandoned carts).
- Market share on specific markets (for example PayPal holds 40.52% of the global market and 59.63% in the United States).
- Transaction fees (fixed fee per transaction + percentage on sale).
- Number of options available from your payment service provider.
- Complexity of the initial set up.
It is strongly recommended to compare at least three payment service providers before making your final decision.
Final Thoughts
To be successful, your ecommerce strategy should be part of your overall company strategy.
Don’t make it an isolated project, start small but think big, plan out for evolutions and growth, involve your teams and resellers, and talk to experts to validate your initial hypothesis and scenarios.
Sources: Statista, Digital Commerce 360, Research Gate, Capital One Shopping.
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