2. Focus on operational efficiency as early as possible
Another common pitfall when starting an e-commerce business is not fully thinking through the potential operational workload to come, especially if the business is as successful as hoped. It can often be a case of saying “I am just setting up this store and I will send this product to whoever buys it.”
Sometimes it’s easy to think about a business idea only in terms of design and production but there are of course a great deal of practical issues to consider at the delivery end of the value chain. This is especially important to think about if you work full time and are beginning the business as a kind of professional hobby. You really need to be careful about how you spend your time.
It is a good idea to already establish how much operational workload you can cope with once the orders begin to pile in. Developing an operational plan should provide a much clearer idea of when it makes sense to outsource logistics over a certain amount of orders per week. It might also make sense to set up a 3PL (Third Party Logistics provider) process from the very beginning because then you will be able to focus on growth and marketing instead of getting caught up with time consuming practical issues. Establishing an efficient process for running the business is critical.
Automisation might also be relevant for other areas of the e-commerce company than just logistics, such as marketing. For example, there are good tools available to help with publishing and scheduling content on social media at certain times of the day. Any areas that can potentially be automised to free up time for critical tasks should be closely assessed.
It can be natural for a company starting out to focus on keeping costs close to zero and trying to do everything in-house. However, in some cases it might actually make sense to invest a bit more in automation and operational structure as spending time on the low value adding tasks may inhibit other areas of the business.
Getting practical hands-on experience of running different parts of your company in the beginning is undoubtedly a good way of making sure you become more business savvy. Once you find out which areas are more value adding, you can gain a better idea of where to optimise time. It’s very important when starting a business to make sure motivation stays high despite the initial challenges.
3. Going global? Make sure you feel local!
In general, most e-commerce businesses begin with their home market and see how things develop from there. The advice I often give is not to be afraid of going global already from day one. This doesn’t necessarily mean undertaking marketing in all of the different countries as that may become quite expensive and difficult to keep an overview of without the right people and tools. It’s more about considering whether to have different domains for each country and translating web pages into local languages as this often helps conversion rates.
On top of that, local payments are an extremely important factor to consider in each market. The Nordics in particular are very fragmented with different currencies in the four home countries as well as different forms of preferred payment methods for consumers. There are lots of things that you can do to increase your global reach but you also need to make sure that your customers feel the local touch and are safe and secure enough to buy on your e-commerce platform.
Once again, in considering the scope and type or your international reach, it’s important to do research. For example, reports have shown that some countries can be more open to reading content in English than others, so this is obviously something to think about when building a website. This is true as well for currencies, with the willingness of customers to pay in a different currency than their home currency varying in each location.
It’s important to do the research for each and every country to make sure you adapt to that country’s specific preferred standards. You can’t just think that US dollars, euros and English will be sufficient for your customers and your business, adaption based on data is very important.