As your business grows, you expect that expenses and processes will grow and become more complex. However, it is possible to grow your ecommerce business without sacrificing efficiency or your bottom line. It just takes strategic adjustments along your supply chain. We break down four crucial areas and recommend where you can improve for 2024.
Inventory Management
Whether you have large products or very, very small ones, the process for managing your inventory is relatively the same. You need to have an organized system in place, and you need to keep your management process consistent and – for your sanity – simple. It’s likely you already have the basics in place including SKUs (stock keeping units), UPCs (universal product codes) and QOH (quantities on hand). However, you might also want to keep track of storage location, supplier information and retail pricing for future orders and price management. Especially if you are keeping hundreds of items in stock, consider an integrated inventory management system that can help take some of the manual steps out of this process.
Product Review
Take a look at this year’s best sellers and the “not so popular” products. How can you offload the products that are crowding your shelves? First, consider a deep discount or sale which can be especially effective after the holidays. Consider the angle, “Didn’t get everything on your wishlist? Grab a special gift – just for you!” Another strategy is to create gift bundles that partner your best sellers with some of your less popular products and increase the marketing around those gift ideas for the upcoming year.
If your P&L is showing some clear poor performers, it’s important to not only move those products off your shelves, but understand why they didn’t click with your customers. If there are few or unhelpful reviews on those products to give you a direction, take a look at your overall product line. Are there similar products in different colors or sizes that are performing much better? Trying to understand the “why” behind poor performers can help product development in the future.
Marketing and Advertising
In a surprise to no one, research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute states that 95% of B2C marketers use social media to connect with their audiences, followed by their website (86%), blog (76%) and email newsletter (68%). Capturing ROI on these organic platforms can be difficult, so review the analytics that show engaged customers moving through your sales funnel. How often are people clicking links on your social posts? How long are people staying on your website? What’s the open and click through rate on your newsletter?
Advertising, especially digital, can give you additional data for which campaigns performed best depending on your audience demographics and where they live. Did certain age groups view and interact (like, share or click) with an ad? Where are they located? What time of day were they most active? Build your 2024 marketing and advertising strategy with these analytics in mind.
Shipping
Unfortunately, many customers are used to “free shipping” options thanks to big name ecommerce brands. Although this is likely not feasible on every order, think about where your threshold for free shipping might be. Determine if there are opportunities to promote free shipping and encourage higher sales in the process to offset the cost. For example, can you promote a minimum order dollar amount to encourage buyers to increase their spending? Or, consider “time limited” free shipping for abandoned carts? This free shipping “exclusive offer” should have a short window – 24-48 hours only – to increase urgency and sales.
Your supply chain provides multiple opportunities for time and money savings. Although we looked into four areas here, our experienced team can provide a complimentary checkup of every area of your supply chain including analyzing your vendors and reviewing your sales and marketing strategies. Contact us today to learn more, and let’s start 2024 with a bang.
