How to Scale Your Ecommerce Business

You’ll never grow and scale your business if nobody knows it exists, which is why establishing a winning marketing strategy is essential.

Whilst there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to market your business, there are some key areas you can focus on which are likely to lead to success. These include:

Paid Marketing

When you decide on your marketing budget, consider setting some money aside to run paid marketing adverts.

These can be social media adverts on key platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, PPC (pay-per-click) ads to help boost your Google rankings, or banner adverts on relevant websites.

Paid marketing can be a great way of reaching new customers and offers some of the best data and analytics to track your success.

SEO

SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing your website so that it appears in relevant search results.

This optimization can include featuring relevant keywords in your content, building a backlink profile for your website, and creating an unrivaled user experience.

The higher your site appears in the results for search terms relevant to your business, the more traffic you’re likely to attract to your website, which in turn helps to boost your online profile.

Retargeting

A key part of scaling your business is attracting new customers, but you should also aim to retarget those who’ve found your store but are yet to convert.

Retargeting customers who have visited your website or abandoned their cart can be a great way of convincing them to complete their purchase. The best ways to do this include targeted social media adverts and email campaigns.

If you’re serious about scaling your business then you need to invest in automation.

This involves outsourcing some of your current, day-to-day tasks to automation services, helping to reduce the man-hours you spend on basic tasks.

Services you can automate include repricing, gathering feedback, and customer support.

By automating certain tasks it frees up your time to focus on other areas of the business that need your attention.

Also, as your business grows you’re likely to find that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for you, or even a team of staff, to complete everything. Investing in automation software, therefore, is likely to become essential.

Whilst automating customer support with the help of chatbots can often be a helpful step as your business grows, it shouldn’t jeopardize the quality of customer support that you offer.

If your customer service stinks, then customers are unlikely to return or recommend you to a friend – no matter how good your products are!

Keeping your customers happy is important, and ensuring there’s human contact available at some stage of the customer service journey ensures you’re providing the best experience possible.

We recommend combining automated services, such as chatbots, for simple and frequently asked queries, with live chat and telephone contact options for customers who require more in-depth assistance.

As you scale your business you’re going to need to stop self-fulfilling your orders.

When you first start out selling online, packaging and shipping each individual order yourself may be manageable. But as your business grows and the number of orders increases, you’re quickly going to find it impossible to keep up.

We recommend hiring a fulfillment company to take on the job of processing, packaging, and shipping your orders. Outsourcing has many benefits, from saving time to increasing your profits.

Whilst the initial outlay may come as a shock if you’re trying to keep overheads low, it’s an investment that will allow you to scale up exponentially. In other words, you’ll soon make the money back.

The platform you use to sell your products, whether that’s your own ecommerce website or a marketplace such as Amazon or Etsy, is crucial if you want to scale your business.

First impressions count, so making sure your website is inviting and appealing is essential. You need to make sure that you’re using high-quality product images and providing users with all of the information they need to make a confident purchase.

A good user experience is also essential. Customers need to be able to navigate your website with ease, and find what they’re looking for without having to compete with annoying pop-ups or slow load times.

If you’re looking for the perfect platform to build your website then make sure you check out our guide to the best ecommerce website builders.

More Information

• Interview with TileCloud: Hear from online tile brand, TileCloud, about how the business found success online

If you’re using a marketplace to sell your products then you’ll face a lot of competition. Popular marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy all feature thousands of individual sellers competing for users’ custom.

In order to successfully scale your business, therefore, you’re going to need to keep on top of your marketplace strategy.

This includes frequently reviewing your prices, product range, and shipping rates, as well as customer reviews in comparison to your competitors.

You need to offer potential customers a clear reason for shopping with you over another seller.

Unlike when you buy something in person, purchasing online means you don’t get to physically see the product before you commit.

That’s why so many customers want to read reviews of individual items before they make a purchase.

Collecting reviews, therefore, has become an essential part of the consumer journey, and displaying these in an easy-to-find manner can help to speed up your growth.

Often a good review is the final push a user needs to make a purchase.

If you display customer reviews you’re helping to build trust with your audience, which is a key factor in convincing potential customers to convert.

Scaling your ecommerce business requires not only strong foundations, but setting smart business goals, and investing time and effort to reach them.

If you’re serious about scaling your ecommerce business then the key steps to take are:

1. Establish a marketing strategy
2. Invest in automation
3. Provide excellent customer service
4. Outsource fulfillment
5. Refine your website
6. Optimize your marketplace strategies
7. Utilize customer reviews

There’s no time like the present to start growing your ecommerce business – try out these methods and let us know how you get on!

Want more great tips to help you grow your business? Expanding internationally is another great way to scale your business, and localizing your content and strategy can help do that. Find out more in our guide to ecommerce localization.