When you first set up your online store, you’ll spend some time fine-tuning your offer, fixing the right price point, and attempting to market your wares. During this period, growth is slow and you’ll not be generating a huge volume of orders. But at some point, when the right factors fall into place, you’ll begin ramping up your sales and expanding your reach – and this is a moment to make sure you’re delivering for customers and capitalising on your profits. Here’s how to manage that growth in one short article.
Stock
As a seller online, whether you have your own web store or you’re using a platform such as Amazon or eBay to sell, you’ll be rated on your service delivery. That rating is, of course, partially referencing the products you sell and their quality. But it’s also referencing the speed of your delivery service and your ability to exceed customer expectations at every stage of their transaction with you.
In order to ensure you’re always in stock, delivering to your customers as soon as possible after they’ve clicked through the checkout, it’s useful to have a management system in place that prepares new stock as products fly off your digital shelves. Just in time (JIT) inventory management is becoming the go-to method to ensure you’re meeting your inventory requirements, ensuring you’re never waiting for stock to come in that has already been ordered by a customer.
Products
As well as getting your stock right, you should also think hard about the kind of online store you want to be. With more traffic hitting your pages and more people purchasing your goods, you have a unique opportunity to expand your product line. After all, once you’re visible to online shoppers, they may wish to order more than one product from your store, radically boosting your profit margins in the process.
Still, bringing in heaps upon heaps of new products isn’t necessarily the wisest move. Such decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis. Very particular niche, in which case it might be preferable to keep your product lines limited to items that serve that niche. But if you’re selling sporting equipment, for instance, you may find that the more products you sell, the more purchases you’re likely to generate from your visitors.
Reinvestment
With the increasing cash rolling into your firm, much of it in profits, you should consider what you’re going to do with that newfound capital. Some online stores are happy to park their ambitions and siphon off their profits into personal bank accounts as a wage. But if you’re ambitious, you’ll know that your cash can be used to invest in your business in order to see it grow even further.
Online stores will always benefit from an injection of marketing spend, especially if you partner with an experienced marketing agency that will help you locate and target entirely new consumer segments. You might also wish to revamp your website, redo your brand and your logo, or even develop a new product in-house, from which you can generate more profit. These options should all be under consideration as you’re building your store up into a large, popular online retailer.
Staff
Growing stores process more orders, receive more queries, deliver more packages, and respond to more customer complaints. All of this means that you’ll need to hire at least one extra member of staff who can help you manage the growing responsibilities you have towards your customers. Failing to deliver on customer service can be terrible for your brand, which is why the customer service assistant is so important for any business.
Meanwhile, you might find it useful to bring in a marketer in-house. They will ensure that your website has top-notch SEO, that you’re using the correct keywords, that your product photographs are as stylish as possible, and that your social media pages are active and characterful.
Feedback
You’ll always receive feedback when you’re selling online. Not all consumers will leave a product or a business review online, but as your firm grows, you’ll realise that you’re accusing many mentions and online reviews. These are important sources of feedback which you can concentrate on in order to improve your business.
You’re especially looking out for delivery time, price point, what the customer deems to be good value for money, and the quality of the product itself. These are vital moments of feedback during which you can hone your business into an even more impressive operation.
Make your growing online store go from strength to strength with the tips outlined in this guide.
