eCommerce has become increasingly saturated with online shops competing against each other based on a few percentage differences in profit. With that, the marketing cost and the costs of achieving a sale are getting higher.
These are just a few challenges Ecommerce companies are dealing with daily.
In this article, we will focus on the currently essential subjects based on the patterns and demand emerging with online shoppers on the one hand and the supply chain on the other.
Competition
Starting an online business that does the same thing as another one mainly demands a lot of funds to replicate the idea and spend more money and better assorted.
Selling the same product as your competitors is in these days as easy as it gets for most cases. The difference is in the marketing of the product, having just the right amount of it in the warehouse so that you do not increase your deadstock and the average order value.
The competitive edge between your competitors is in how you do your marketing, the quality of service, and the offered price.
Getting as many reviews as possible to prove that you offer quality products and helpful support is in, these days, the bread and butter of closing online sales.
Stand out from the crowd, be engaged with your customers, and make them as satisfied with your service as possible.
Growing marketing costs
Due to the saturation of the E-commerce market, various problems with social media giants, different data protection legislation, and much more, affect the constantly growing prices of marketing online.
Although new online marketing channels and possibilities are opening up, like TikTok, the results are minimal compared with older channels. The advertising prices might be low, but the results are either too low or not fast enough.
The most efficient way to optimize your marketing costs is to customize your website to grow your conversion rate and average order value. In addition, recovering abandoned carts and offering post-purchase special offers with text messages or emails is a great idea that guarantees results.
Customer loyalty
Staying in contact with your customers is vital as it grows customer loyalty and lowers the overall marketing costs. Retaining your customers to remain loyal is the crucial part.
Many competitors can steal your loyal customers, so having a good relationship with your customers is the current task of eCommerce companies. That can be done with social posts, emails, or text messages.
No matter the case, keeping in touch with your customers is vital. The important part is finding the right way to stay in touch. So far, emails have been used for this type of communication. Since there is such a vast daily flood of new emails, spam, and promotions tabs, more emails are overseen.
The solution is to use different marketing channels to be more recognized than your competition.
Product price
This is a two-part problem. The price of the product the company buys it for must be low enough for the Return on investment to be positive. The price for the end buyer is calculated based on various factors, including shipping and importing costs, marketing costs, percentage of unclaimed packages, warehouse costs,…
A multitude of factors influences the final price, one of them being the profit margin. The lower it is, the lower the product’s price is for the end consumer. E-commerce companies compete with prices to the point that some companies can not compete.
That is why it is becoming increasingly essential to work on a well-recognized online brand or sell unique products and high-quality customer support.
Delivery times
As is with product prices, so do the delivery times affect E-commerce companies in two different ways.
The first problem is the supply chain – the time to deliver the products to the warehouses. The delivery time used to be noticeably faster than it is these days. Companies are stockpiling products in advance to prepare for the holiday season. But that can become a serious problem if they buy too many of these products. In that case, they have dead stock, which they will probably have problems selling.
The second challenge is the delivery time to the customer. The quicker the arrival of the product, the happier the customer is. Thus, the online shop is more likely to get a regular customers.
On the other hand, having a slightly longer delivery time than your competitors, customers might change their minds just because of impatience.
An excellent example of optimized delivery times is Amazon Prime, with its same-day or next-day delivery times. The simplicity of the experience is one of the key parts that play a role in the success of Amazon.
Customer support
With the low attention span, high amounts of fast-to-digest information, and special offers on every corner, customers get confused about where they even bought the product.
Not finding that vital part of information a visitor is looking for on the website and just can’t find it is becoming more and more noticeable. That does not mean that the information is not there; it is just not seen by the visitor.
Either it is due to the lack of User Experience quality control, or the problem lies within the visitor. And more often than not, the information is there; the visitor just did not take enough time to find it on the website.
Offering an online chat option or call is the best option. The reason for that is that they happen at the same time as they are interested in buying the product. With emails, you usually need to wait till the next day when perhaps the interest in buying the product drops.
A kind and knowledgeable support team are essential to get as many good reviews and testimonials as possible. They are a vital part of any E-commerce business and offer a great Up-Selling channel!
Cyber security
The faster the technology grows, the higher the chance that there is a loophole within it and that security issues could be present. Online shops store large amounts of personal data besides other information and options for long-term exploitations with the servers on which the shops are hosted.
A regularly updated website and occasionally changing passwords covers most of the basics. There are multiple ways of additionally securing your website with the help of Sucuri and WordFence.
These tools regularly check your website for vulnerabilities or possibilities of already happened intrusions.