The Ultimate Guide to scale your Shopify store
Every business owner knows that increased steady sales are the key to growth. No merchant would want to get inconsistent sales and expect to grow over time. When it comes to scaling your eCommerce business, you need to enable and support the growth process to be successful. If you run a Shopify store, how do you plan to scale your store considering the number of competitors in the market? Sales and growth are directly proportional to one another. Therefore, to ensure you have steady sales that will boost your growth, here is a simple guide to scaling your Shopify store. Improve mobile experience More than 87% of online shoppers use their mobile or smartphone to make a purchase, therefore, improving the mobile experience can help your store. There are several ways to do this. You can test the usability of your website and make it mobile-friendly. An easy-to-navigate website is essential to a positive experience and customer satisfaction. It makes it easier for customers to buy from you. Furthermore, ensure your website speed is excellent because when a page loads slower, it turns off shoppers. Improving your site speed is essential when scaling your Shopify store because customers are not patient, slow loading sites are penalized, affecting your sales since it takes less than 2 seconds for a customer to abandon a cart. Show social proofs Nowadays, social proof is everything since we are in a social media age. Displaying social proof such as feedback and reviews allows your customers to read about other shoppers’ experiences. You need to use social proof to scale your Shopify store because it helps build trust and credibility. When other customers see positive reviews from previous shoppers, it boosts and encourages them to buy products from your brand. Furthermore, these customers that provide reviews can become your brand ambassadors, who can help convert indecisive customers to make a purchase. Another benefit of showing social proof is that it gives customers an unbiased insight into your brand. These pictures can provide insight into the quality of your product and services. Start upselling and cross-selling Cross-selling and upselling is another way to scale your Shopify store. Upselling involves convincing your customers to upgrade and buy an expensive product than they would have preferred to buy. When you encourage upsell, you maximize the profitability of your store. Furthermore, it is easier for you to encourage your existing customers to spend more to get more benefits. Use email marketing campaigns Email marketing can help boost your sales. You can personalize emails to help strengthen the customer journey to making a purchase. Implement email marketing contributes to scaling your Shopify store as it builds a stronger relationship with your customers. You can implement different email marketing campaigns to scale your store. With discount emails, you can offer unique coupons to encourage customers to buy specific products and drive your website traffic. Personalized emails can also help to boost your sale, while you can use product announcement emails to inform your customers about your latest products in your store. Get creative with automation tools Shopify automation app frees you from repetitive tasks and creates room for growth. There are countless options to minimize manual processes tailored to your own business model. You can get some ideas from this post: workflow automation examples to increase productivity.
eCommerce Challenges And The Automation Solution
Each online merchants executes over a thousand small tasks every day. If not managed effectively, these tasks could hinder productivity and stampede growth. In other words, operational management is one of the biggest challenges for any eCommerce store. Instead of focusing on incremental changes, businesses should focus on improvements, changing how a company operates. Today, eCommerce automation is giving stores an optimal solution for their challenges. It unleashes the time needed to invest in crisis communication, working climate, dealing with new suppliers, retraining staff, sales, marketing, and HR challenges. What is eCommerce Automation? Running an eCommerce store comes with a lot of challenges. Automation is the use of software in the replacement of human agents in certain work. In this sense, eCommerce automation is software built to convert campaigns, processes, or tasks within your business into automated workflows that execute when needed. It entails how businesses can do more without human intervention. eCommerce challenges that automation can conquer eCommerce stores always have to face up multiple problems. As the business expands, the complexity, demands, and repetition increase. Previous systems that used to work effectively become inefficient and eventually break down. In trying to alleviate their current issue, they turn to time-consuming works, affecting the overall business. Meanwhile, the most powerful resource of any business is their time and energy. Let’s look at the challenges that automation can conquer if you want to start a new eCommerce store. Complex and time-consuming manual processes working with multiple systems Several eCommerce sales reps spend half of their time communicating with customers. Nevertheless, paperwork is no longer effective these days. It is hectic, especially if it’s a repetitive process as it takes a lot of time to complete. If you want to operate faster and easier, you need to automate your system to reallocate time, money, and human capacity to other aspects of the business. Lack of data and insight Once your business grows, the time and operational costs increase accordingly. The same goes for data generated in your inventory, operations, and finance. In this case, the right eCommerce automation tool will help you leverage data processing and make wiser decisions. Once you have accurate data, you can create relevant and contextual reports. This allows your staff to stay ahead and provide a better customer experience. Lack of personalization and transparency in customer experience When it comes to online transactions, customers want as much control over their data as possible. Transparency is also an important factor. They want access to every piece of information about their order and the freedom to change it when necessary. Furthermore, they expect responsive interaction from customer service. With automation, it is easier to allocate resources that will better understand your customers and improve their satisfaction. In the end, it helps boost sales in your store. Overcome challenges with Atom8 Atom8 is the workflow automation platform that can be integrated into BigCommerce and Shopify. The app optimizes your business by automatically reorganizing tasks, streamlining processes, and feeding data to other customer-facing applications such as Mailchimp, Google Sheet, or ShipStation. It empowers you to be more productive and fosters time-saving work. Some of the app features are: Auto-categorize orders (based on value, locations, etc) Auto-segment customer (based on demographics, spending, the total number of order, etc) Auto-tag customers on CRM, email marketing, and delivery platforms Auto-generate reports & lists on Google Sheet Auto-publish products Auto-notify of low-stock items, abandoned cart, or high-value orders Auto-detect and halt high-risk orders
Common causes of backorders
As a retailer, what action do you take when your store goes out of stock? What do you do when the demand for your product surges? How do you meet the demand when you have limited stocks? What if there is a sudden surge in your backlog? If you can provide relevant answers to the questions above, then you know how to control your inventory. However, what if the demand increases beyond what your stock has? Once you can’t fulfill your customers’ demand, they will shift their focus to your competitors. It means you will lose sales, and it will affect your overall revenue. In this situation, you need backorder features when faced with an increase in demand. It requires careful planning to ensure the orders are fulfilled in a timely fashion. What is Backorder? The meaning of backorder is a process where a supplier or retailer takes orders for a particular order that is not available in your inventory. Businesses must deal with backorders when out-of-stock issues arise. However, what causes backorders? Understanding what causes backorders is a key to dealing with the issues of backorders. Causes of backorders Inventory miscount Inventory miscount can happen when there is a stock inwarding. Most times, it is because of human error why we experience inventory miscount. For instance, a store owner might mistakenly miscount an available product only to discover it is beyond the estimated amount. Delayed inventory sync Delayed inventory sync also contributes to backorders. For instance, you sell products through several channels while keeping a central inventory through channels. Expired and damaged products not updated Damaged or expired products can cause backorders; when a product with an expired shelf life with the information not updated in the system, it causes backorders or shortage. Furthermore, it inflates the inventory count in your store. System outage or error Another significant reason why you might experience backorder is due to system outages or errors. It occurs when the inventory doesn’t get updated frequently as required. Once the inventory doesn’t show currently available stocks, it causes extra orders to show in the store. Other causes of backorders Besides these, damaged products cannot be counted in inventory, and once the system doesn’t update such information, it affects the number of items in-store. Furthermore, offline product billings might not be updated in the inventory on time. Another reason for backorder is the issue of employee theft. When an employee illegally takes an item out of the inventory, they hardly update such information on the system because it can be noticeable. In such a situation, you might have a shortage from what you can see in your system. Inventory misplacement is another common cause of backorders. For instance, when an order comes into the warehouse, once the staff cannot find the complete item in the warehouse, it creates a backorder situation. Additionally, an increase in order velocity during the festive and holiday period can cause a backorder once the system isn’t updated regularly.
