4 Ways to Scale Your Ecommerce Business

With the proliferation of online shopping and accessible store builder platforms, the ecommerce industry is easier than ever to break into.

But even though the modern ecommerce business is certainly accessible, many entrepreneurs find it difficult to scale their business while staying true to their original concept and avoiding the issues that come with growing too quickly.

If you’ve had some initial success in the ecommerce arena but are unsure of where to go next, let’s dive into some ways to scale your business!

How to Scale Your Ecommerce Business

The world of ecommerce is full of opportunity, but it can also be turbulent. Here are 4 great ways to grow and scale your ecommerce business!

1) Delight Your Customers With Helpful Content

The products you’ve been selling have already shown customers that you can provide the physical commodities that they’re looking for. However, to successfully scale your business, you’ll need to showcase the value of the brand behind the products, and give people a reason to keep coming back to you rather than shifting to your competitors.

One of the best ways to develop trust in your brand is to create content that’s useful, engaging, and authoritative enough to show that you’re an expert in your industry. Aside from delighting your customers, producing consistently helpful content will also help attract backlinks to your website, which is a major SEO ranking factor.

A useful framework to bear in mind when you’re developing your content calendar is Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principles, which Google uses to evaluate how likely a given piece of content is to resolve a user’s query.

As content marketing specialists Hive19 states, “If you own or manage a website you need to be aware of E-E-A-T, especially if you are in the Your Money Your Life (YMYL) sector. This includes any website that offers information, advice, guidance on topics related to medical, legal, or finance sectors.”

2) Grow Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is a hugely popular marketing channel for modern brands, and it lends itself particularly well to ecommerce brands who want to generate traction with a fairly broad audience. However, due to its passive nature, many ecommerce businesses tend to let this marketing discipline fall by the wayside once they’ve had enough affiliates join their program.

If it’s been a while since you had a close look at your affiliate program, some of the best ways to optimize it for growth are:

Reviewing your affiliates

All the different responsibilities faced by marketing managers can make it hard to vet every affiliate for quality properly. This means that affiliate programs can quickly become oversaturated with affiliates who don’t measure up to the level of quality you’re trying to showcase for your business.

Be sure to periodically check sites for consistency in your branding, the amount of traffic they receive, and their authority to make sure your program is up to scratch.

Finding the right software

With affiliate marketing being such a popular discipline, the modern market is brimming with different platforms and supporting tools you can use in your campaigns. Like affiliates themselves, not all affiliate marketing software is created equal. It’s important to keep your go-to tool under a critical eye and ensure that it’s making your affiliate processes as efficient as possible.

Be sure to check out our own ClickBank platform and find out how it can streamline finding great affiliates, managing your offer, and ensuring that you, your affiliates, and associated taxes are being paid.

Remember to educate

While it’s possible to take a “set and forget” approach to your affiliate marketing, managing affiliate programs is a multi-faceted marketing discipline that covers relationship management, contract negotiation, account management, and more.

Even if it’s not your biggest source of high-intent traffic, it’s important to constantly educate yourself on affiliate marketing and look for new ways to optimize your program.

3) Optimize Your Order Fulfillment

Modern consumers have extremely high standards when it comes to order fulfillment, and expect their shopper experience from landing pages onwards to run like clockwork. With the massive logistical capabilities of giants like Amazon, independent ecommerce companies are under a huge amount of pressure to make sure their order fulfillment is up to scratch.

Streamlining your inventory management by maintaining accurate sales forecasts and using these to inform stock levels, along with keeping highly detailed inventory records, can prevent unused space and help keep your operation in-line with demand.

It’s also a good idea to review the tools you’re using for order fulfillment, and aim to bring disparate data sets into one unified platform to consolidate sales forecasts, inventory levels, purchasing data, and anything else that affects your order fulfillment. 

Finally, developing your working relationship with vendors through regular meetings, discussions around how you’ll approach supply chain interruptions, and check-ins with your internal team, can help you to weather any order fulfillment turbulence and keep your customers satisfied.

4) Constantly Improve Customer Support

Scaling your ecommerce business isn’t just about bringing in new customers. Making sure returning customers are getting the best possible experience is also essential for your continued success and maintaining a positive brand reputation to support future marketing efforts.

Obviously, you’ll already have some customer support resources and policies in place. To ensure your customer relationships stay as positive as possible, however, you’ll need to be constantly looking at how issues come about, how your support staff deal with each ticket, and what you could be doing better in every situation.

One major improvement that a lot of ecommerce brands can use to help them scale is pivoting to an omnichannel customer service strategy. IBM defines omnichannel customer service as “assistance and advice for customers across a seamless and integrated network of devices and touchpoints”. This trend has been gaining a lot of traction across industries in recent years, and customers are increasingly expecting brands to provide them with consistent omnichannel experiences.

Wherever your customers are able to interact with your brand, whether that’s on Instagram, Whatsapp, Twitter or anywhere else, making sure your responses are fast, helpful, and consistent will instantly boost the standard of your customer experience. 

Setting aside a regular block of time to review the state of your customer support will help instill a mindset of constant improvement. Even though you may not have the bandwidth to overhaul your customer support, making little improvements over time can still have a tremendous positive impact on your customer experience, leading to better retention, a higher level of trust, and a healthier rate of growth for your business.

Scaling Your Ecommerce Store Wrap-up

Whether you’re taking your first steps into the world of ecommerce or you’ve been running your store for years, actively scaling your operation is a hugely fulfilling project for any ecommerce leader. 

We hope this post has given you some great ideas to apply to your own growth strategy and helped you map out a clearer path to your long-term ecommerce goals.

Author Credit: Daniel Groves – https://danielmgroves.co.uk/