Regardless if you run a small online business or a full-fledged enterprise, ecommerce management remains complex. Online retailers have to organize and oversee all sorts of moving pieces to stay on the path toward profitability (and customer retention).
Luckily, there’s software that can help you overcome the challenges of ecommerce management so you reach your growth targets with ease.
What is ecommerce management?
Ecommerce management is the practice of maintaining an online business. Generally speaking, ecommerce management aims to help brands reach their goals for product quality, customer acquisition, and customer retention while providing a customer experience that aligns with brand values.
An ecommerce manager helps select website content and products, creates pricing and promotional strategies, and sees that products reach the customer as quickly (and as cost-effective) as possible. Once these products are selected, the ecommerce manager (or operations team) ensures inventory levels and records align with promotional initiatives and regional consumer demand. From there, the manager or ops team joins the marketing team to develop a digital strategy for customer acquisition, search engine optimization (SEO), and affiliate programs.
On top of that, the ecommerce manager also has a hand in customer retention. More specifically, they oversee a seamless digital experience and buyer journey, work in collaboration with warehouse and contact center leadership—and make recommendations on improving website performance and capability development so customers come back again and again.
Why is ecommerce management important?
Ecommerce management is critical to running an online storefront, marketplace, or app. Effective ecommerce management helps your business avoid common inventory challenges (like overstocking and overselling) and ensures you uphold the standards for customer experience.
In addition, ecommerce management helps you adapt to fluctuations in demand in real time so your customers stay happy (and your revenue stays high). Plus, the most successful online brands have leveraged ecommerce management to grow their audience and stay competitive in such a crowded retail environment.
In short, ecommerce management helps brands of all sizes make sense of their digital operations and run the most profitable business possible.
5 Ways to Ensure Ecommerce Management Success
Now that you know the challenges associated with ecommerce management, you might be curious how to ensure success in this area. Fortunately, there are several routes you can take to make sure your ecommerce management is the best it can be:
1. Hire an Ecommerce Manager
If at all financially feasible, ecommerce companies should consider hiring an ecommerce manager. An ecommerce manager is an important position with a wide range of responsibilities—but the advantage for your business is that this person oversees your entire online presence across your ecommerce site, app, and marketplaces. This means that they often coordinate your online presence and digital marketing campaigns, ensure the stability of your online infrastructure and order fulfillment, and direct the activities of web developers, copywriters, and other specialists on your team.
With that said, if you’re an entrepreneur or running a small business, it might not be in your budget to hire for this role. In that case, you don’t need to be tied to this specific job title. Instead, you can focus on the principles of ecommerce management—products, acquisition, and retention—and then ramp up your operations team to tackle these areas.
Alternatively, you can look into agencies, chatbots, and remote freelancers instead of hiring an in-house manager immediately; use time-tracking apps to keep track of billable hours and better manage your outsourcing budget. This approach saves you time and money while allowing you to assess whether the ecommerce manager really needs to be in-person/full-time. Consider utilizing an outsourcing calculator to optimize your resource allocation further.
2. Implement Tight Feedback Loops
Customer feedback loops are a strategy for constantly improving your products. These loops are based on the natural (and mutual) interactions between a company and its customer base. The great thing about integrating feedback loops into your ecommerce management is that it helps you connect with customers on a deeper level and quickly diagnose issues that might exist—which is often a challenge for online retailers who don’t engage with customers in person.
Surveys, emails, and reviews are great ways to collect customer feedback. If you use email to gather feedback, ensure that your email domain resembles your company name to boost the likelihood of higher open rates. These tools give you a pulse on who your customers are and shine a light on their buying habits, product preferences, and more. While each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, you might find one better fits your business than the others.
Before launching a ratings and review program, ensure you have a process to quickly address any negative reviews from customers. Often, when customers see a response to a negative experience, it gives them more confidence in their purchase. When a company does not address negative reviews, it can harm your conversion, brand reputation, and future sales.
In addition, you can use machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) to collect large amounts of data and customer insights—leading to a more personalized shopping experience. Machine learning leverages algorithms that remember product choices and preferences so you can advertise accordingly. It can also summarize large volumes of customer feedback, chats, call transcripts or other data to provide actionable lists for you or your team to address.
Even if you don’t have tons of data for machines to ‘learn’ from, there are new ecommerce solutions coming to market all the time that are geared towards startups and small businesses.
3. Use Technology for Data-Driven Decision-Making
While many online businesses start out using spreadsheets to track and manage their inventory, these spreadsheets tend to be time-consuming, error-prone, and inflexible. This fragmented, inaccurate spreadsheet data limits both your profits and your ability to scale to an omnichannel business.
The good news is that there’s a much better option for managing your ecommerce operations. Not only do inventory management systems (like Extensiv’s Order Management platform) track your online sales, inventory levels, and deliveries, but they also help you avoid the pitfalls of understocking, overstocking, and overselling. Extensiv's Order Management tool centralizes your data and insights to give you a full picture of your stock levels and sales data across all sales channels and marketplaces.
But the best part? The Order Management platform helps you make data-driven decisions about demand forecasting, reorder points, and optimal inventory levels. Using Extensiv's Order Management capabilities, you can compare current data and previous sales trends to forecast spikes/declines in demand—and provide product listings tailored to customer preferences.
4. Optimize Inventory and Fulfillment Workflows
Another advantage to inventory management software is that it naturally optimizes your inventory workflows. The best ecommerce platforms, including Extensiv Order Management, leverage automation to help with stock requests, purchase order approval, and streamlined replenishment. So, if you’re using these systems within your ecommerce management, you’ll be set up to maintain a continuous inventory flow in and out of your warehouses.
If you have brick-and-mortar retail locations, you can also maximize the visibility of the inventory in your stores through omnichannel fulfillment. This allows your stores to ship online orders, provide services like buy-online pick-up in-store (BOPIS), or reserve online and pick up in-store.
Speaking of warehouses, don’t forget you can outsource fulfillment to a 3PL fulfillment expert. Teaming up with a 3PL means you no longer have to pack boxes, print shipping labels, negotiate with shipping carriers (and the list goes on). Completing these tasks daily is too much for most ecommerce sellers, which is why so many businesses optimize their order fulfillment workflows with the help of a 3PL.
Looking for a partner for outsourced order fulfillment? Explore Extensiv's Fulfillment Marketplace to find the right fit for your business.
5. Reevaluate Goals Often
Goal setting is a huge part of ecommerce management. How can you know whether you’re successful if you don’t have goals to gauge where you’re winning and where there’s still room for improvement? Once you’ve developed specific goals and/or revenue targets, you can use ecommerce metrics—like sales conversion rate and average order value—to see if you’re hitting your numbers or falling short in certain product categories.
The point is continually redefining and reevaluating these goals as your company grows and acquires new customers. Paying attention to your sales and ecommerce metrics helps you determine if you’re on the right track with your marketing, fulfillment, and so on. But more than that, these metrics indicate the products you should keep or cut from your catalog (so you always generate the greatest possible revenue).
Supercharge Your Ecommerce Management with Extensiv
Looking to level up your ecommerce management and improve operations across the board? Extensiv can help! Extensiv’s Order Management platform gives retailers unmatched visibility and control for all sales channels—and helps you deliver the flawless fulfillment modern consumers expect.
Maximize Sales Channel Opportunities
One of the highlights of Extensiv’s Order Management solution is its ability to seamlessly integrate all your sales channels into one centralized platform. Extensiv offers comprehensive integrations with major channels and marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify to give you greater visibility into your inventory and increased control over your order management.
Even better, you can tap into new sales channels using pre-built application programming interface (API) integrations through Extensiv Integration Manager that are specially designed to handle higher order volumes (at a faster speed). And suppose any issues crop up as you move into multichannel or omnichannel territory. In that case, Extensiv's Order Management platform will be right there to allocate your inventory and help minimize stockouts/overselling as you propel your business to new heights.
Automate Order Management
Extensiv Order Management is equipped with all the intelligence you need to automate routine tasks and identify when intervention is needed. Thanks to its end-to-end validation, you can use innovative automation that puts all your orders in order. This system ensures you always have the products your customers want—and it automates the processes you need to move orders from your sales channels to the end customer.
More accurately, Order Management's advanced automation capabilities help you route orders to the optimal warehouse by configuring logic-based rules called orderbots that account for inventory availability and geographic locations. Moreover, these orderbots can automate other actions to split orders based on available inventory or determine ideal shipping methods. The result? Improved efficiency, higher customer satisfaction, and up to a 67% reduction in order lead times.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
The reality of retail is that customer expectations have never been higher. Like it or not, modern consumers expect a lot from their favorite brands—like unlimited product availability and the shortest possible delivery windows. Thankfully, Extensiv's solutions for brands can help you meet (and even exceed) consumer expectations by handling 99% of purchasing and fulfillment decisions on your behalf. And if that wasn’t enough, Extensiv Order Management will even alert you when intervention is needed so your customer support team can step in/help out to the best of their ability.
Interested in learning more? Request a demo today to see how Extensiv can supercharge your ecommerce management in no time!
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