The primary step towards effectively scaling an e-commerce business is making sure it has a robust, scalable infrastructure. E-commerce infrastructure relates to all the tools and facilities required to operate an e-commerce business. It’s composed of numerous components that usually have to join forces to solve critical e-commerce problems.
That e-commerce infrastructure includes the software applications, hardware, and services that help the business from start to finish. For example, working with services like IT company Warwick RI-based managed services will help you build a business from the e-commerce venue and improve your business technology performance.
Furthermore, regarding building a scalable foundation of your business, below are the main areas you should consider to build a solid and scalable e-commerce business infrastructure.
1. Develop An Effective Marketing Strategy
E-commerce marketing is a comprehensive journey that plans out and executes a few or all types of online marketing to ensure you gain customers. If you don’t have a solid e-commerce marketing plan, you won’t attract customers to your online shopping website. For that reason, it’s crucial to build your marketing infrastructure to drive target customers to your online store. The good thing is that you can use social media, search engines, and emails to encourage customers to go to your website.
To give you a sense of what online marketing looks like, below are a few marketing venues that help you scale your business:
- Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating written content, infographics, photos, and videos on various social media platforms to increase potential customers and conversations. Although the costs of this strategy are relatively low, it usually takes a considerable amount of time and effort to see actual results. Nevertheless, it’s one of the vital strategies that can help your e-commerce marketing.
- Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing contains both paid advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine marketing can involve pay-per-click campaigns, product-specific campaigns, or display campaigns. In particular, regarding pay-per-click campaigns on Google, they ensure that potential customers will see a link to your website page whenever they enter specific search words that match the terms of your campaign.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the forms of digital marketing that has a significant value in the e-commerce marketing field. The best part about email marketing is that any e-commerce marketer can automate it. Simply put, you can organize a successful drip campaign for email subscribers segmented by particular factors—like needs, interests, or stage in the customer’s journey—and let the email campaign to the marketing.
However, even though that’s the case, you still need to be meticulous about your email list to maintain trust among your potential customers. In other words, you need to be careful when and how you add online store visitors to your mailing list.
2. Provide Excellent Customer Service
As your e-commerce business scales, you need to provide excellent customer service to your new and existing customers whenever they have questions or challenges throughout the buying journey. As an e-commerce business owner, delivering a stress-free online shopping experience for your customers must be one of your priorities. It could mean answering the customer’s queries or solving their issues on your online shopping website through social media or emails.
In general, customers are usually afraid to approach a customer service agent. They often prefer to discover the solution to their concerns on their own before interacting with a customer support person. With that in mind, if you’d like to enhance the customer’s experience throughout the buying journey, you can do that by providing self-service options for them.
Suppose you see a pattern within your e-commerce customer service platforms where customers frequently ask the same questions. Then, you can consider creating FAQ documentation for them on the website to help them get what they need without needing assistance.
3. Outsource Online Fulfillment
E-commerce online fulfillment is another area in your business that needs robust infrastructure as it requires everything from warehousing inventory to product shipping and delivery. Hence, you’ll need to spend a notable amount of capital on the warehouse area, fulfillment team, fleet management if you solely manage everything. But fortunately, you can consider hiring a third-party logistics to handle the order fulfillment operation. They’ll manage the fulfillment process from warehousing, picking orders, packaging, shipping, and up to delivery.
Third-party logistics is an industry expert on fulfillment and shipping items. They work with various sellers and manage masses of orders. And that allows them to negotiate with prominent shipping carriers and offer significant discounts on shipping fees which they can grant to e-commerce owners like you. Most importantly, they have the infrastructure to manage complex needs as they occur to reduce any issues fast, which leads to much more efficient scalability as your e-commerce business grows.
Conclusion
Overall, every e-commerce business needs a solid infrastructure to support its operations and customers. Building a scalable infrastructure to match your business plan allows your e-commerce business to operate and scale successfully. With that in mind, you can consider the scalable e-commerce infrastructure given above to help you achieve your business objectives.
