Your eCommerce Challenges
Like it or not, selling online on two or more channels increases complexity, effort and the opportunity for mistakes, all of which are ecommerce challenges you can reduce by investing in the automating power of a system or systems.
We’ve identified five areas you need to resolve to be successful.
1. Finding the fit: customisable ecommerce software
It’s the age-old dilemma: if you want to invest in software to grow your business, do you adapt your processes to the way the chosen software works (sometimes called business process re-engineering) or do you customise the software to the way you work?
While the answer will depend on your size, circumstances and plans for your company, many ecommerce businesses – the vast majority of which are small-to-medium-sized enterprises – will justifiably argue that theirs is unique and therefore demands a unique solution to help them scale their growth and profitability.
Here are six good reasons behind opting for a genuinely customisable ecommerce software system:
- A better user experience (for your staff and your web consumers)
- The opportunity to scale
- Streamlined operations
- Improved data security
- Better analytics and insights
- Staying ahead
2. Failure to launch: the ecommerce scaling problem
The 2006 film Failure to Launch, starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker, centred on the difficulties of easing an adult son out of the parental home. In an ecommerce context, failure to launch is about the challenges of profitably growing the business as it expands in sales, channel coverage and complexity.
Here we touch on six areas where the scaling problem presents ecommerce challenges:
- Managing listings and stock
- Handling order fulfilment and shipping
- Integrating and reporting on data
- Delivering a uniform buying experience
- Dealing with channel-specific rules
- Picking the right channels to focus on
3. Lack of balance: the perils of unbalanced inventory levels
Managing inventory effectively is crucial to ensure smooth operations and customer satisfaction. However, maintaining good inventory levels can be a significant challenge. This challenge increases markedly if you sell a multitude of products at differing speeds across different regions, marketplaces and webstores. Unbalanced inventory – having too much stock, too little, or none at all – can create a host of problems that negatively impact your business.
Here are six areas of concern:
- Stockouts and lost sales
- Excess inventory and holding costs
- Cash flow issues
- Troublesome order fulfilment operations
- Poor demand forecasting
- The customer experience
4. Losing on every sale: selling products that don’t cover the costs if fulfilling them in ecommerce
Ecommerce, especially marketplace ecommerce, is competitive. A variety of factors conspire to make the total cost of getting a product to a customer less than what they’re paying for the item. These include low pricing, expensive logistics, costly delivery and returns.
To compound the issue, many businesses don’t know the full picture of how much it’s costing them to get an order safely delivered, until the financial figures for the period come in from the accountant and it’s too late to do anything. So, there’s selling products at a loss, and not knowing you’re selling products at a loss.
Here are seven profitability challenges:
- Eroded profit margins in the business
- Cash flow problems
- Unreliable or delayed financial reporting
- Unstainable growth
- Damaged brand reputation
- Competitive disadvantage
- Limited ability to work on the business
5. Streamlining manual processes: why a fuller integration of marketplaces like Amazon or eBay is better for multichannel ecommerce sellers
Multichannel selling has become a necessity for ecommerce businesses aiming to scale their growth and profitability. Amazon and eBay are two of the most influential marketplaces, offering vast audiences and significant sales potential. However, managing these platforms effectively can be challenging. When you add in other marketplaces and webstores, your staff are performing essentially the same steps, but in multiple places and in slightly different ways to fit each specific channel.
Sellers often choose between providers offering fuller or lighter integration with these channels. Pricing, as you might imagine, generally reflects the level of integration. While a lighter integration may seem simpler and cheaper, a deeper integration offers substantial advantages that can drive sustainable growth and profitability – in other words, better return on investment.
Here are seven areas where broader and deeper channel integration – by which we mean more ecommerce business areas and more functions within each area – is better for multichannel ecommerce sellers:
- Supply chain and purchasing
- Warehouse and inventory management
- Products and listings
- Marketplaces and web stores
- Order management
- Customer communications
- Data and analytics
