Now is the Time to Build Your Long Term Ecommerce Process – Here’s How

This post argues that’s it’s time to look beyond emergency ecommerce measures and establish a proven process to build your long term resilience. The process is outlined in this complimentary ebook.

According to a recent article by eMarketer, ecommerce globally is set to get close to $5 trillion this year. More importantly, as you can see below, 2020 saw a jump of 28% over 2019. Ecommerce’s share of total retail leapt from 13.6% to 18%, in one year. The one reason? Coronavirus. Ecommerce is projected to progressively eat into the total retail pie over the next few years, getting to a 22% share in 2024, which we feel is on the conservative side.

This remarkable growth was not without a corresponding amount of disaster recovery and fire-fighting, especially for those sellers who didn’t have an established ecommerce presence. In fact, you could argue we’ve been in a sustained period of emergency ecommerce measures since March 2020, which is coming up for a full year of stop-start physical retail.

With the new financial year around the corner for many companies, now is the time to plan and budget for business resilience, because if there are two things that will characterise the next few years, they are change and uncertainty. And the best way to combat this is to establish a process for building long term growth through long term resilience and flexibility.

The resilience comes from having an optimised presence across a range of online channels – marketplaces and web stores – and the right range of channels for your business category and regions where you sell. The flexibility comes from being able to switch the channel priorities quickly, depending on circumstances.

Two factors are key to getting to this happy place. We’re going to assume that a great consumer buying experience from search to door is a given, so it’s not one of the factors. The first is data quality. The quality of your product data on each channel, in combination with your marketing plan, so that you maximise your exposure and conversions. The quality of your data analytics too, so that you can easily take action on what’s really happening in your business.

The second factor is being able to connect your online sales channels so that you centralise the control of them. Otherwise, if you’re working on your marketplace and web store channels directly then you’re duplicating effort and that doesn’t enable you to scale your growth and profitability.

So how do you build a process to execute a strategy that gives you this resilience and flexibility, and gets you out of emergency response mode? We see a 5-step process which we’ve summarised below.

1. Get an audit. Start with an evaluation of where you are right now and where you want to get to. Often an independent specialist can help you with this
2. Decide your strategy. Which marketplaces do you need to be on, in what order, and what’s your plan for your web store(s)?
3. Pick your partners. Who’s going to help you deliver on this, what will they do for you and what does your investment look like? (We’ve written a separate ebook on this called Buying Multichannel Ecommerce Software which walk you through the process and what to think about, and which you can get here
4. Implement your investment, in the form of specialist services and technology to connect your channels and give you one window on your multichannel operations
5. Launch, measure, rinse and repeat. Completing the cyclical pattern and going again, over time, for the long term

We go into more detail on this process in this free ebook called ‘Your Long Term Ecommerce Strategy for Marketplaces and Web Stores – How to build resilience for the future, whatever the weather’. To talk to us about your long term requirements, please get in touch with us here.