Improving the operational efficiency of your ecommerce setup

The first step is to look at your ecommerce setup as a whole. Are all members and functions performing efficiently and with commercial targets in mind? Taking a step back to analyze your internal workflows can reveal surprising bottlenecks and areas for improvement. Make sure that at least the following are in place:

• Cross-functional communication is a must: How effectively do your teams (marketing, sales, customer service, sourcing, etc.) communicate? A common problem is that there are silos hindering progress or even organizational incentives that contradict each other. Implementing clearer communication channels and regular cross-functional check-ins drastically improves efficiency and customer experience. Why not include cross-functional members in the ecommerce team with aligned responsibilities and incentives?

• Automate repetitive, simple and time consuming daily tasks: Are there repetitive daily tasks bogging down your team? Explore the automation capabilities within your current platform and integrated tools. Automate your email marketing sequences, order confirmations, inventory updates, and customer service responses in order to free up valuable time and reduce errors. This will enable your team to do more valuable things, while repetitive tasks are done by automated and AI-powered sequences. Even though you might feel that this might be under control, we urge you to take another look. It’s quite common that teams in fact are swamped by tasks that could and should be performed with the help of AI and automation.

• Become data-driven, since it will help you win ground both internally and externally: Are you truly leveraging the data your current setup provides? Dive deep into your analytics, seek to understand real customer behavioral patterns, identify best-selling products and top buyer demographics, pinpoint drop-off points in your sales funnel, and analyze the performance of your marketing. Keep track of this data in order to compare for example campaigns against each other or to follow up on the development based on your data based decisions. This is key, since it enables you to make better commercial decisions – as well as helping you to convince different stakeholders regarding your mission and why it’s something worth investing in.

• Make sure that your team is up to date regarding skills and capabilities and let them do their thing: Are your teams equipped with the knowledge, mandate, and skills to maximize the potential of your online sales? Are they fully familiar with the capabilities of your current set of tools? Start with making sure that they are truly onboard with what you are commercially aiming for and not left with on a need-to-know basis. That will help them to perform more efficiently and make commercially sound decisions.  Invest in training and empowering your team to take ownership, because that’s the best way to find innovative solutions and even more efficient ways of working as well as how your set of tools are used. Finally, avoid internal bureaucracies and hierarchies, because 9 times out of 10 they only result in bottlenecks, hindering change and causing inefficiency.

Inefficient processes bleed time, money, and have a negative impact on customer satisfaction. So take a good look at the processes around your ecommerce setup to find places where you can streamline things. Let's break down the customer journey step-by-step and also how you run things internally.

• Customer touch-point review: Map out every touchpoint a customer has with your business, from initial discovery to post-purchase follow-up. Identify friction points, areas of confusion, and opportunities where you as a brand can surprise. Simplify your checkout process, make sure your site navigation and content hierarchy are user friendly, and keep your communication up to date and clear. You also might want to look into including personalized content and product recommendations. We want to emphasize that all of this is an ongoing process and you will never be ready, so keep on analyzing, optimizing, testing, and iterating. The competition is way too fierce for you to not keep on improving.

• Inventory management review: Nothing is more annoying for customers than seeing an advertisement, wanting to buy, and then finding out that the item is out of stock. If you are consistently facing stockouts or holding onto excess inventory, you really need to look into this. Make sure your automated marketing is aligned with what you have in stock and that you are not marketing “out-of-stock” items. Excess inventory is a reason for pushing out those products because you want to keep your inventory optimized. Good inventory management processes ensure you have the right products, at the right time, and at the right price. This will minimize lost sales, storage costs, and marketing spend.

• Keep your customer service standards high: Ensure your team has the tools and training to resolve issues quickly and empathetically. Implement self-service options like FAQs and knowledge bases to handle common inquiries. We recommend you use AI to help you with it because a lot of it is most likely repetitive behavior. Just remember to moderate it so that it feels personal and on brand. Empower your customer service to solve issues when possible because they can easily convert negative situations to positive ones. You will see that by incorporating this your customer service process will become more efficient and effective, while simultaneously ensuring that the customer experience won’t take unnecessary hits. 

Guesswork has no place when running a successful ecommerce setup. A/B testing allows you to make data-driven decisions about what resonates best with your audience. Your current platform likely has some built-in A/B testing features or integrates with tools that can help you. If that’s not the case, you can easily use simple 3rd party tools to conduct the tests. By following these tips you can improve commercially. 

• Focus on metrics: Define clear goals for your trials. Are you trying to increase conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, or improve click-through rates? Track the metrics that matter most to your business objectives.

• Test everything: Don't limit your testing to just button colors, imagery, or comms. Experiment with headlines, product descriptions, images, call-to-action text, layout variations, pricing strategies, and even different steps in your checkout process. 

• Start small, scale big: Begin by testing elements on high-traffic pages or those with significant drop-off rates. Once you identify winning variations, implement them across your sites.

• Keep a backlog: Record everything you do in order to learn and be able to report progress and back up decisions. 

It’s good to remember that testing is an ongoing process and not every test will yield a positive result – but every test provides valuable insights into your audience's preferences. Use these learnings to continuously refine your website and marketing efforts. Remember to not get frustrated when you find that something that worked well a month ago ended up flopping when applied to a different audience and offering. It’s just both the beautiful and the ugly part with testing and really underlines the fact that you are never ready because change is never ending.

When it comes to optimizing and refining, there are no rules. One often overlooked refinement tip is to look at product range and how creatively you use your existing tools to untap hidden potential. 

• Explore opportunities regarding your product range by looking into widening and/or deepening your product catalog, introducing complementary products, offering variations, or incorporating DSV or Marketplace functions. 

• Look into repurposing existing solutions. Your email marketing platform can be leveraged for personalized product recommendations, your customer service software can most likely be adapted to gather valuable customer feedback, and your mobile application’s push messaging can be used to prompt real-time buying behavior.

What we want to say is that by creatively looking at your product range and how you are using your current toolkit, you can unlock new avenues for engagement and drive commerce without changing almost anything. Look at it creatively in order to increase internal efficiency and customer appeal.

To sum it all up

Hopefully you see that you don't always need a brand new solution or function to hit targets; sometimes all you need is to fine-tune the one you have. By diligently examining your ways of working, optimizing processes, automating repetitive time consuming tasks, and embracing the iterative power of testing, you can extract significant value from your current ecommerce setup. This approach is not only cost-effective but also allows for continuous improvement and a deeper understanding of your customers and how your setup actually works in the eyes of the users. 

So instead of being discouraged about all the shortcomings of your current setup, take a closer look at what you possibly could improve by thinking outside of the box. You might just be surprised over the possible untapped potential that was just sitting there waiting to be unleashed. Start analyzing and start testing – you never know what you’ll find unless you try. It’s about looking at what's right in front of you, planning, testing, simplifying, taking down barriers, and most importantly, doing things until you improve!

Hopefully this post gave you some food for thought. In case you’d like to hear more about potential possibilities, please reach out to me via email or LinkedIn. We’ll gladly give you a free consultation regarding possible low hanging fruit in your specific setup.