05 Aug Preparing eCommerce Business for Unlimited Growth | Acumatica UK
- Check if your e-shop is capable of receiving an increased amount of clients without degradation or collapse.
If you have an e-shop stored in own hosting check the maximum limits of visitors you can have per day and per month. Does it correspond to your marketing and sales plan? Does it have space for growth? If not, consider better hosting plan within the same hosting provider or change it to one which will meet your expectations.
If you use a third-party platform for your online store management check the following – Is it cloud-based? Do they provide daily backups for your store? Will your store be sharing a server with other companies, how many of them? Are there limits for orders or visitors? How will increase the costs of the store if you decide to scale your business?
- Check if your e-shop is mobile-friendly or consider eCommerce app.
You can have a fully responsive e-shop, which is enough for all operations your clients will do from their mobile phones or tablets.
But if your web analytics data shows more than 50% of purchases performed from mobile devices, you have to consider the cross-platform eCommerce mobile application development.
- Make sure you use SSL protection, with safe credit card processing.
E-shops which don’t have an SSL certificate installed can’t process clients’ payment securely. You can use free SSL certificates, but even if you have purchased it, make sure that it will not expire unexpectedly one day. Use recurring billing so that you will have it prolonged automatically.
- Protect your e-shop from attacks.
While working with customers online, you may face different types of fraudulent behaviour – from financial fraud, spam, phishing, bots, gathering information about your products, DDoS Attacks, SQL Injections, Trojan horses, and many more… to avoid any unexpected situations in the long term, prepare for them from the beginning of your online presence – secure your admin panels with complex passwords, change them frequently, limit access to your admin panels for employees, use different login details for different people; use antivirus and antimalware software from your hosting provider, use additional eCommerce security plugins, update your e-shop as soon as new versions of software are released; train your employees to recognise suspicious activities on your e-shop.
- Always backup your e-shops.
Just do it. Train your employees to back up your e-shop at least once per week if your products are updated often, and once per month in case your products remain the same during longer periods, (e.g. 1-2 months). Set up automatic backups in your hosting or make sure hosting provider makes backups every time. Check how long these backups are kept available for downloading to know how much time you have in case you need to restore everything.
- Make sure your e-shop is GDPR-compliant.
Update your privacy policy, add info about how you gather, process and protect customers personal data. Make sure you have your employees taught how to handle these data and that only trusted employees have access to these data.
- Pay attention to your ratings.
Prevent blockage after negative reviews if you sell through online platforms. Make sure your employees know how to handle cases when customers are not satisfied.
- Select the best-performing products, suppliers, markets and platforms.
Test everything you can – what products are with the highest demand rates, which suppliers grant cooperation without problems, which target markets perform better.
Stop selling products which are not needed by 80% of your clients, stop cooperation with suppliers if the efforts spent don’t correspond to results achieved, check which platforms are easier to manage and refuse to use those which demand much more time for maintenance.
Use Pareto’s law – analyse what 20% efforts give you 80% of results, what 20% of products give you 80% of sales, what 20% of suppliers provide 80% of products, etc.
- Offer diverse delivery and payment options, show shipping costs.
Include all possible costs so that you don’t have complains about delivery costs not mentioned in the final price or returns. Offer comfortable and safe delivery options from top logistics companies.
- Encourage customers to write reviews about the products they have purchased.
They can do this in your e-shop and in their accounts on social networks. This will grant social proof and increase credibility. Monitor feedback from your clients and use it in your e-shop to build trustworthy brand name.
- Automate customer acquisition through digital marketing – PPC, Facebook, Instagram, email, cooperation with influencers and SEO.
eCommerce business growth is impossible without promotion, brand building and digital marketing. Before you fully automate the flow of leads, test all appropriate for your business platforms and methods, test different audiences, test advertisements and time when you promote your products.
After you know what works and what does not work, you can switch off platforms which don’t give expected results, focus on audiences which react to your offers more often and fast and delete advertisements which work worst of all.
- Automate routine of customer support with the help of chatbots with AI.
Create a list of typical problems your clients have when they contact your support team. Create a list of full answers to these questions. Use these lists for automation of customer support with the help of pre-programmed chat not. This will save you a lot of time and money if you want to grow. Not typical questions and issues can be handled by people from outsourced call centres or your support team.
- Automate customer retention through retargeting, abandoned cart auto-reminders, email promotion and lead nurturing.
Clients who leave products in the cart and don’t proceed to check out still can be returned to your shop with the help of retargeting. Just show them retargeting ads in online sources which they visit. You can also set up the automatic flow of emails for such customers if they are registered in your e-shop and you know their emails.
- Automate products synchronisation in case you source products from suppliers and not produce it in-house.
If you have a few products you can handle your e-shop easily without automation. But if you want to grow your business and increase the number of products in the shop, increase the number of shops, you will need automation of products importing, bulk price updates, stock control and sales predictions.
- Automate invoicing, order processing and returns handling through ERP implementation.
When all your business processes are defined, client acquisition and retention is automated, you have stable production or source your products from suppliers, you have tested all the platforms you need for your e-shop, and decided which you keep – it’s time to automate coordination of all the business processes in your business with the help of an ERP system.
Acumatica has perfect solutions for the UK based fast-developing eCommerce businesses which are eager to grow without limits.
And it doesn’t matter if you use Magento based e-shop or Shopify platform, or any other eCommerce platform, you can reduce the time and costs spent on management of all the processes related to sourcing, selling and shipping of products, financial reporting, returns handling, supply planning and predictions as well as many other routine tasks.
Read more about ERP for eCommerce here
