Ecommerce businesses are a modern version of the mail-order business. This business model has a number of advantages. You can generally reach a truly global market, and it is easier to find your niche with ecommerce than a retail store. The operating costs are generally lower, since you don’t have to pay for retail space in a mall or facing the street. This means that labor expenses are a larger share of their budget, barring rent, inventory and taxes. Here are 4 labor saving tips for ecommerce businesses.
Contract with a Mail Management Services
Ecommerce companies regularly outsource their IT, whether it is hiring the experts to maintain their website or ecommerce store on sites like eBay or Amazon. However, many would benefit from outsourcing work to mail management services to The Delivery Group. Let them mail out everything other than the individually packed orders. Let them mail out your marketing materials, your invoices and your bills to consumers. Let them mail free samples to consumers and ship trial items to retailers. This reduces how much material your front desk or order pickers have to deal with.
Be Strategic in Your Social Media Marketing
It is easy to get caught up in general web surfing or online arguments when you’re doing social media marketing. The solution is to outsource the posting of content to your official social media profiles to a specifically curated list of articles and content created by marketing. This could be done by an intern or a marketing professional and have a set schedule for posting. Then they’ll have the rest of the day to work on data analytics or email marketing.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore the engagement content. Do set time to review the comments and social media mentions. Then have them forward specific concerns to customer service, tech support or marketing as they come up. But don’t have multiple people reading and responding to the general chatter on the internet. You’ll never get a good ROI on the time spent.
Get On a Schedule
Schedules should be seen as a support for the team, not a constraint. Schedule pickups of packages so that your team knows when to rush shipments and when they can slow down. In fact, you could schedule breaks and meal times after pickup times to maximize productivity and give everyone as much time as possible to relax. Schedule deliveries of supplies and inventory so that people don’t waste time waiting for items, whether they’re short a critical item in the warehouse or in the supply closet.
Leverage Pareto’s Law
Pareto’s Law is the 80-20 rules. Eighty percent of your products account for twenty percent of your sales. Twenty percent of your customers account for eighty percent of your profit. Analyze your financials and determine who these money-makers are. Consider dropping your slowest selling items so you have more space for the top sellers. You might want to drop the 20 percent of customers who account for most of your complaints or product returns. However, you must prioritize your most profitable customers if they’re unhappy with something. This is true whether they account for the highest volume of sales or the most profitable sales.
Have your sales team determine their best prospects. Don’t waste time cold-calling or working on low-value customers when there are lower hanging fruit.
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Founder Dinis Guarda
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