Running an ecommerce store is like juggling plates. An ever-shifting landscape with multiple technologies, targets and channels to consider. From daily sales, monthly campaigns and annual strategies to merchandising, personalisation and loyalty – there’s a broad range of responsibilities to consider. After many years working closely alongside ecommerce managers, we thought it was time to start noting some of the recent challenges we've come across, and our tips on similar suggestions we've made with our own clients.
1. Increasing Competition and Pricing Pressure
Rising operational costs across the board have significantly impacted ecommerce managers, putting additional pressure on maintaining competitive pricing. From the costs of goods and materials, supply chain expenses, shipping and distribution, SaaS licence and high interest rates, the overall cost of running an ecommerce operation has been steadily increasing over recent years. Balancing these rising operational costs with the need to attract increasingly price-sensitive consumers is a challenging task. Today’s ecommerce managers must be laser-focused (and well-equipped with the right tools) to offer value for money while preserving healthy profit margins.
Unified’s Top Tip: To navigate rising costs effectively, make it a cyclical exercise to review and renegotiate supplier contracts. Regularly assessing these agreements can help identify opportunities for better pricing, bulk discounts, or more favourable terms, especially if your business has grown and can leverage higher purchase volumes. This proactive approach can lead to significant cost savings over time. Additionally, conduct a thorough review of your tech stack to analyse the total cost of ownership (TCO). Streamlining software and consolidating tools can reduce redundant expenses and improve operational efficiency. Aim to integrate systems where possible, so you’re not paying for overlapping features, and negotiate with vendors for multi-year deals that often come with better rates.
2. Customer Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention
Businesses need to attract and retain new customers. Ensuring online visibility used to predominately focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Paid Search. Now there are myriad channels to consider, from Google to TikTok to Instagram – each with their own best practices. Once onsite, convincing a customer to convert involves setting up seamless customer journeys; placing social proof at key points, offering personalised experiences and enhanced upsells. Post-purchase, generating loyalty and advocacy is now a key part of ongoing ecommerce strategies. A 2% increase in customer retention is as effective as a 10% reduction in services. Selling to an existing customer has a 60/70% success rate, compared to 5 to 20% rate for new customers (All taken from SemRush).
Unified’s Top Tip: Invest in your brand and creative output. Strong branding and engaging creative content make customers less price-sensitive, as they are more likely to resonate with your message and feel a connection to your products. In today’s landscape, where customer acquisition costs are rising, it’s essential to maximize the chances of a sale once a visitor lands on your site. Focus on user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) by creating seamless customer journeys. Test and iterate continually, placing emphasis on clear navigation, fast load times, and well-timed calls to action. Build A/B testing and data-driven improvements into your workflow, so you can fine-tune the online shopping experience based on what truly works. Additionally, invest in personalisation and social proof at key points in the journey to boost conversion rates. Simple touches, like showcasing reviews, personalised product recommendations, or bundling relevant products, can significantly improve the likelihood of conversion.
3. Managing Marketing Costs
With a continually increasing pool of competitors, it’s no longer enough to throw money at paid search and social media to attract new customers. More targeted strategies need to be considered, taking into account PPC, content marketing, SEO, social-channels and influencer partnerships. Discovering which channels provide the greatest ROI is even more challenging – with precise management needed to get the biggest bang for your marketing buck.
Unified’s Top Tip: To make the most of your marketing budget, it’s crucial to build clear, comprehensive dashboards that provide a snapshot of key metrics across all paid channels. We build these on Databox for our clients. Using a tool like databox you can easily consolidate data from PPC, social media, display ads, and other channels into one visual dashboard. This allows you to quickly identify which strategies are delivering the best ROI and which need adjustment. Making it simple to track essential performance indicators like cost per click (CPC), conversion rates, return on ad spend (ROAS), and customer acquisition costs (CAC) in real time. This real-time visibility enables you to optimise campaigns efficiently, reallocating budget to the best-performing channels with precision and accuracy.
4. Efficient Inventory and Supply Chain Management
Stock management and supply-chain management. Words to strike fear into some ecommerce managers! Ensuring there’s enough stock to sell but not so much the mid-season sale products are a no-brainer can be a delicate balancing act. Then there’s getting the products to the consumer. Liaising with the warehouse and making it easier for them, investing in the right software, engaging with a trusted logistics partner… And if you’re selling globally, there’s cross-border commerce to consider. All of which impacts on the customer’s view of your brand.
Unified’s Top Tip: Invest in smart inventory management software that uses real-time data to track stock levels, sales patterns, and demand forecasts. This allows you to maintain optimal inventory levels, reducing the risk of overstocking or running out of popular products. If you’re managing cross-border commerce, work closely with trusted logistics partners who have experience in international shipping. They can help navigate customs, duties, and local regulations, ensuring a smoother delivery process that positively reflects on your brand.
5. Managing Returns
The bane of many a brand, returns are a necessary evil for ecommerce Mangers. Simplifying returns by implementing a clear, easy-to-follow policy and using data to track return reasons is one way of tackling this, but with one in three online purchases being returned (CBRE, 2023), it’s an area that needs efficiency planning. Reducing the number of returns made, by tracking reasons for a product coming back to the warehouse, making sure all useful information is displayed onsite and generally reducing the prospect of a return is key to helping provide an easier life.
Unified’s Top Tip: Use return data to refine product descriptions, further reducing the opportunity for a misunderstood purchase! Consider partnering with solutions like Swap Commerce, which can streamline the process, making it more efficient and customer-friendly. Additionally, offer store credit incentives and eco-friendly options to minimise costs and enhance customer loyalty. As an ecommerce manager, we hope that if these resonated with you, that our tips offered some useful food for thought.
swapcommerce.com, 2024
6. Adapting to Market Changes and Omnichannel Integration
New technology, market trends, changing consumer behaviour… Pandemics… There’s a lot going on in the ecommerce space. Keeping up with it all, in addition to managing the existing store – creating implementation plans and liaising with potential new partners. It can be a lot to manage. Additionally, Omnichannel is no longer a ‘nice to have’. Your customer experience needs to be the same across all touchpoints – from in-store to the Instagram shoppable reel to the ecommerce store itself. Deciding on technology that offers seamless brand perception, marketing and even inventory management is key to the success of your brand.
Unified’s Top Tip: With new trends and technologies emerging constantly, adopt a ‘test and learn’ approach to quickly identify what works best across different channels. Run small-scale pilots for new campaigns, features, or channels (like a new social platform or promotion) and gather data to measure their impact. This helps you make informed decisions without committing to large-scale changes before you’re sure they’ll deliver results.
7. Meeting Evolving Customer Expectations
The modern consumer is everywhere. Thanks to technology, improved logistics and tireless workers, we can now research a new face cream at 8pm, order it at 10pm and get it at 12pm the next day. Accordingly, our expectations have increased to the point where we want personalised interactions and recommendations from the brands we connect with (but not too often), as well as appropriate pricing and, most importantly: convenience. Whether we’re on our phone, laptop or in-store. Add in our increasing desire for sustainability, and you have a potent mix of servicing to offer your customers. Navigated effectively, this can create loyal and engaged returning consumers. Adopting personalised marketing automation tools, and even AI-powered customer service solutions can help. As can asking for and analysing customer feedback. Understanding what’s going right (and wrong), as well as overall sentiment, is a key driver in ensuring a customer-focused strategy to help meet their growing expectations, with 92% of companies saying that post-sales engagement increases credibility with their customers. (Forrester, 2020).
Unified’s Top Tip: No matter how advanced your ecommerce strategy becomes, the fundamentals remain crucial. Ensure basics like great customer support, clear communication, and transparent shipping costs are solid before venturing into automation or complex processes. Customers value reliability and clarity, and these core elements build trust and loyalty, ensuring a smoother customer journey overall.
8. Technology Adoption and Integration
In this wonderful space, with all these wonderful technologies, there is always a new shiny object to consider. This might provide a competitive edge, or prove an expensive folly. The key is understanding which platforms and services genuinely add value to your tech-stack, and which are flashes in the pan. A.I., for example, has great potential in automating responses and analysing data – and with 92% of online businesses planning to invest in AI (Gartner, 2024) - which tools are the genuine article and which tech for tech’s sake?
Unified’s Top Tip: Before diving into new platforms or tools, start by identifying key pain points in your current operations, and define clear objectives for what you want to achieve, whether it’s automating tasks, enhancing customer engagement, or streamlining inventory management. Group potential tech solutions based on how well they address these specific issues, and prioritise those that solve multiple problems effectively. Assess how your new tools integrate with your tech stack, and each other, and consider how this affects daily operations.
9. Data Analysis and Utilisation
There is a lot of data out there now. Customer intents, shopping habits and preferred content; market trends, technology uptake, effective SaaS tools. Understanding how to extract the appropriate data from it, and understand how to create actionable insights is, for many, the holy grail. Used correctly, ecom managers can enhance their GTM strategy, improve their marketing and increase their CRO.
Unified’s Top Tip
Unified can help not only by enlisting these tools and helping you build reports, but by running training sessions to help your wider staff understand the value in, and take actions out of, data.
10. Data Protection
Finally, all this data needs to be protected. GDPR has placed an increased responsibility on the retailer to prevent their customer data from falling into the wrong hands, and other threats such as phishing attacks and data breaches have become more sophisticated. While there are many secure ways of keeping the data safe, no website is infallible. While perhaps not the ultimate responsibility of the eCommerce Manager, as guardians of their customers, it is a role which falls under their umbrella to react to and reassure their customers that their privacy is at the forefront of their shopping experience.
Unified’s Top Tip
Regularly audit your data practices to ensure compliance with GDPR and other regulations, and implement best practices like data minimisation and encryption. Being proactive also means educating your team about data privacy risks and establishing protocols for handling customer information securely. Make sure your customers are aware of your commitment to their privacy by maintaining clear and concise privacy policies, and offering transparency on how their data is used.
Conclusion
Running an ecommerce store is no small feat, but with the right strategies and tools in place, it doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. By tackling these challenges head-on and staying agile in your approach, you can navigate the complexities of pricing, marketing, customer retention, and tech adoption. Remember, it’s all about finding the right balance and making smart choices that align with your brand and business goals. And, of course, having a partner like Unified on your side can make a world of difference, helping you transform these challenges into opportunities for growth.
If any of these resonated with you, we’d love to see how we can help. Get in touch with our team to find out more.
