The Volo 10th and 21st birthdays – lessons learned

We’re celebrating the Volo 10th and 21st birthdays and this post shares some of the lessons from our customers that we’ve learned on the way.

(We’re not big fans of blog and social media content that promotes ourselves, since that’s of questionable value to you, our audience. But birthdays are worth celebrating, so please forgive the indulgence this time.)

How can we be celebrating both our 10th and 21st birthdays? Easy, really. The Volo brand was launched in February 2015, to much fanfare, and it’s a distinctive brand that has served us well and that we still remain faithful to.

Before Volo we were esellerpro, the foundations of which started 21 years ago in 2004 when Chris Farrelly, our founder and CTO, built one of the world’s first integrations to eBay. An Amazon integration followed soon after. Now our Amazon and eBay integrations support the dozens of country sites that the two giants of marketplace ecommerce currently run.

We’ve changed a lot in the last 21 years, but since our acquisition in 2019 we’ve remained core to our true offering, which is to help our customer scale up their ecommerce business, by automating as many of their business processes as they like, so they can grow top line revenues and bottom line efficiencies. Customers either come to us when the demands of selling in more than one place become unbearable, or if they want to consolidate or upgrade the systems they currently have.

1) Every customer is unique. No business is the same. Every ecommerce business is subject to different circumstances, factors and cross-winds. Sure, there are similarities, but one size does not fit more than one when it comes to your business. Find a fit between where the market is going and where you’re strong. Seek out solutions and conditions that fit how you want your unique business to run and grow (this may be different to how it currently runs…)

2) Cash and profitability are King and Queen. You know the old adage: sales are vanity, profit is sanity, cash flow is reality. Make friends with your balance sheet (or your account or bookkeeper) so you understand that cash in the bank gives you options and buys you time. No cash to pay creditors is an awful situation to be in. You can’t control your revenues but have far more control over your costs. Seek out partners and providers who are focused on your customers’ wellbeing, and by extension your wellbeing.

3) Ecommerce is a constant challenge. It’s been a rollercoaster since the beginning of 2020 on both the supply side and the buy side. Channels rise and fall or become less profitable all the time. Large overseas markets threaten to disintermediate domestic markets with price-driven strategies. Staying in the fast-moving part of the stream means constantly watching market data and your own data, while hoping the stream doesn’t turn into a rock-laden waterfall. The long term successes lie in diversifying where you sell and letting the robots/automation/software code do what they do better and faster than humans.

4) You have to keep moving. There’s good business and bad business. Good business feels fast, effortless and profitable. Bad business is a laborious, time-consuming slog when it feels really hard to generate sales and make money. Whatever times you’re in, you still have to take managed risks and make investment choices. You can’t stand still and stop making things happen or things will happen to you.

5) Ecommerce sellers are awesome (this last one is ours). Some of us have worked in a lot of other industries, and none of them are like the entrepreneurs in ecommerce. Ecommerce owners are invariably small businesses, living and breathing their operations every day, juggling tight margins and carrying the responsibility of the livelihoods of the families of the staff they employ. Despite this they’re extremely community-focused and are frequently willing to share their successes (and their failures) and their advice.

This post has been about two birthdays – the Volo 10th and 21st – and five distilled lessons we’ve learned over the last two decades. In a future post we’ll share fourteen tips for ecommerce success in 2025. Check back in for these nuggets of insight.

These lessons are scattered across our range of best practice content items, which are free to download and involve parting with no details, on our resources page.

To talk to us about scaling up your ecommerce, get in touch and we’ll set up a call.