With over 26 million eCommerce stores to compete with, how do you stand out? The answer is effective eCommerce management.
If done right, eCommerce management can help you acquire new customers at scale, grow your business, and boost customer retention.
But what is eCommerce management, and what does it require from you? In this article, we’ll share ten top strategies to help you manage your eCommerce business and stand out from the crowd.
A Deeper Dive Into eCommerce Management
eCommerce management is the practice of maintaining your eCommerce shop. This includes all aspects of running an online business, including your marketing strategy, operations, and the technologies necessary to keep your business running.
If you have a small online business, you might be able to handle all aspects of eCommerce management yourself. But if you’re a larger brand, you might delegate eCommerce management to an employee.
If that's the case, an eCommerce manager can help you with customer acquisition, customer loyalty, and improving the quality of your online offering.
eCommerce managers typically also oversee complex eCommerce processes like:
- Product listings.
- Inventory management.
- Order processing.
- Payment processing.
- Market research.
- Marketing.
- Analytics.
- Search engine optimization (SEO).
- Customer experience (CX).
While you could certainly do eCommerce without a management strategy, it’s the best way to scale up your business while boosting profit margins.
If you’re looking for a competitive edge in your niche, you need eCommerce management strategies in your corner.
10 Strategies to Manage eCommerce Stores
Follow these ten best practices to overcome any business challenge by improving your eCommerce management:
1. Build a strong technical foundation
For small eCommerce stores, a single minute of downtime can cost anywhere between $137 to $427. One technical slip-up could erase your website, products, and livelihood for good.
That’s why every eCommerce management strategy should start with a strong technical foundation, starting with these steps:
💻 Perform website backups
In the event of a failure or server crash, having a recent backup will allow you to quickly restore your eCommerce store. This minimizes downtime and reduces the risk of losing everything.
💻 Run daily security reports
Regular security reports can help you quickly identify vulnerabilities and threats before they can be exploited and result in a data breach.
You handle private customer information, credit card details, and transaction records. It’s vital that you keep these protected through continuous monitoring.
💻 Test all website code
Testing your website or app regularly allows you to catch and fix bugs before they impact your customers. Bugs get in the way of user experience (UX) and may turn shoppers away from your store before they make a purchase. In fact, 60% of consumers abandon their purchases due to a poor website user experience.
💻 Monitor for downtime
Any downtime can impact your online business’s revenue. If no one can shop your products because your website is down, you lose out on online sales.
This is why continuously monitoring your website for downtime is important. It allows you to deal with issues immediately to avoid losing revenue.
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👉 Top Tip: Get Security Certificates Secure socket layer (SSL) certificates encrypt all the data transmitted from a customer’s browser to your eCommerce website. Having these certificates in place protects their sensitive information. It also makes your brand look trustworthy and credible, showing your customers you’re serious about their privacy. |
2. Keep your content relevant
There are two reasons to keep product pages on your website fresh and updated:
- Customers who continue to visit your online store expect to see new content.
- Search engines reward up-to-date content. If you don’t do this, you can expect your rankings on search engines to drop.
Although you have plenty of responsibilities to manage when running an eCommerce business, content is something you shouldn’t neglect.
To start, regularly refresh and update your product pages so that you continue to attract new and returning shoppers.
Next, you should ensure you create blog articles and other resources for your website. This can help make sure your website continues to appear in search engine results.
However, you aren’t limited to creating and publishing brand-new content to keep customers engaged and boost website traffic. Instead, you can take existing content and freshen it up with new information, additional products, and updated copy.
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👉 Top Tip: Pay Close Attention to Your Product Pages Remove products that you no longer sell from your store. You should also keep images and product descriptions up-to-date to give shoppers the best possible experience. |
3. Know where your time goes
If you don’t know what your employees spend their time on, how can you optimize your business for better results?
You don’t have to implement time tracking as a strict procedure, but you may want to have your team track their time on projects for a couple of months so you can see where their time is being spent.
Some time tracking tools you may want to use include:
The goal of having your team track their time isn't to micromanage them but to find efficiencies.
For example, if you see that too many employees are spending time processing orders, you may want to consider implementing automation software that can tackle this task without the need for human action.
On the other hand, if you see that your team is spending a lot of time on manual data entry but noticing a lot of mistakes, you might want to invest in tools that can handle much of this task for them.
Knowing where time is spent tells you what is (and what isn’t) working when it comes to your eCommerce operations.
You might realize it’s time to roll out AI email writing tools, sales enablement software solutions, or smarter eCommerce integrations to help your team save time.
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👉 Pro Tip: Invest in a Project Management Tool That Includes Time Tracking If you want to take things a step further and dive deep into where your team’s time is going, investing in a project management tool like ClickUp or Asana might be a good idea. These tools allow your team to track time to specific projects and help you manage all your projects in one place. This way, you can see exactly which projects are taking the most time and where you could better allocate your resources. |
4. Implement tight feedback loops
Customers are the heart of any eCommerce store. Your team needs to implement tight feedback loops to keep your customers happy.
Instead of checking customer feedback occasionally, paying close attention helps you gather and regularly implement feedback to build a stronger customer experience.
For example, if many of your customers are asking for a product that is out of stock on your website, you know right away to order more and get this item restocked. This improves customer satisfaction and may turn them into repeat shoppers.
Additionally, feedback loops help you identify and resolve issues that may not be immediately apparent to your team but are affecting your customer experience.
Perhaps your checkout process is too complicated. Or your customers want more payment options. This can help you find problems and fix them before they become more complex and harder to solve.
You can gather feedback manually through the following:
- Surveys: These can be sent to customers after they’ve made a purchase or interacted with your support team. These can be embedded on your website or even sent via text message.
- Reviews: You can encourage your customers to leave reviews and rate products on your website after a purchase. You can do this by sending them a post-purchase email.
- Live chats and chatbots: Implementing live chat support on your website can allow customers to express issues or ask questions, giving you instant feedback and leading to quick resolution.
Alternatively, a more streamlined approach may be using a reputation management software solution to help you monitor customer feedback 24/7.
5. Track your eCommerce analytics
The best decisions you can make for your business are data-driven decisions.
If you don’t know what your most popular products are, how will you know what to keep in stock? On the other hand, if you don’t know which products need more marketing to gain traction, how will you know where to focus your marketing efforts?
You may already be collecting this data through analytics, but it’s important to use this information to improve your business and keep your customers satisfied.
Some metrics you may want to consider tracking in order to have the best insight into how your business is performing include:
📈 Click-through rate
This is the number of times potential customers click a link in your advert or email to visit your website. It is calculated by dividing clicks by the number of times a link is shown.
This can help you monitor how well your marketing activities are performing. It may help you decide which marketing efforts to put more of a budget behind.
📈 Sales conversion rate
This metric is the number of visitors to your website divided by the number of customers who make a purchase.
This tells you how well your website converts visitors into sales and where you may need to improve. If customers are visiting a product page and not making a purchase, you might need to re-design your product pages to be more appealing.
📈 Average order value
This is the total amount of revenue you make from orders divided by the number of orders you receive.
This can help you make decisions about your pricing strategy and how you can improve the amount customers spend on your website.
📈 Shopping cart abandonment rate
This is the number of potential customers who place items from your website in your cart and then leave your site without making a purchase.
This metric can help inform your strategy to ensure visitors go through with their purchase. You may need to simplify your checkout process or provide more shipping options to ensure shoppers complete their purchase.
📈 Returning customer rate
This metric is the number of customers who make a purchase and then return to your site to make another purchase.
This number can help you decide if you should spend resources on keeping your customers returning or if you should focus on acquiring new customers.
📈 Bounce rate
This is the percentage of your website visitors who visit your site and then leave without taking action.
A high bounce rate tells you that you need to improve your website or product offering to keep people on your website long enough to make a purchase.
📈 Top products by units sold
This metric helps you determine your most popular products based on how many units you have sold. This data tells you what to keep in stock and what new products are likely to perform well.
6. Profit from content marketing
We’ve mentioned why keeping your content up to date is important. However, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you need to invest in content marketing.
A content marketing strategy involves creating and distributing content like blog posts, podcasts, and videos to give value to potential customers.
Content marketing is about creating more than just product pages. It’s about crafting non-sales content to attract new visitors to your online store.
You should be providing content that is:
✍️ Relevant
When developing content for your website, you want it to be relevant to what your ideal customer is searching for—also known as user intent.
For example, if you sell jewelry in your online store, you would need to create blog articles and social media posts relevant to people shopping for jewelry.
An example could be how to wear certain pieces of jewelry or how to accessorize outfits with the right pieces.
✍️ Helpful
The objective of content marketing isn’t only to drive sales. It also needs to provide the reader with the help they need based on what they’re searching for.
Surface-level content isn’t enough. You need to dig deep and provide genuinely helpful content to the reader rather than directly selling your products.
✍️ Well-written
Nothing looks less professional than content that has spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. To avoid this, consider hiring a freelance copywriter from a platform like Fiverr.
✍️ Original
It’s easy to look at what your competitors are publishing and attempt to copy their strategy. But this won’t help you stand out from the crowd.
Instead, spend time thinking about content topics that are unlike what’s already being put out there.
7. Adopt an automation software solution
Manual effort is expensive and inefficient. The good news is that there are many automation solutions for eCommerce.
With automation, you can turn repetitive, routine tasks into automated actions.
For example, you can use automation to bulk upload product descriptions and images directly from a vendor’s feed. This is normally a tedious process, but you can save hours of time with a simple automation tool.
With Spark Shipping, you can automate everything from pricing strategies to order fulfillment and tracking. This makes it a cinch to scale your eCommerce business without any manual work.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software are great automation tools that help you build and maintain relationships with your customers, which are essential to your business.
Anytime a customer contacts your business, you already have a record of interactions with them. This helps you tailor your communication around what you already know about them.
Lastly, you can automate your marketing efforts. Email marketing tools, for example, help you send messages to your customers while they consider supporting your business and after they’ve made a purchase. This helps you nurture them throughout the sales process.
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👉 Top Tip: Choosing the Right Automation Software To determine what the best automation solution is for your business, read our full guide on eCommerce automation. |
8. Test your website across devices
How does your website look on smartphones? Or on tablets? Over 75% of U.S. consumers shop only with their mobile devices.
But many people also shop on desktops, so ensuring your eCommerce store displays correctly on all devices is important.
Your online store must meet customer expectations if you want to drive revenue. This makes responsive design a must.
If your user interface (UI) and images look great on desktops but bad on other devices, you might create a bad reputation for your store among potential customers.
One way to ensure responsiveness is to use eCommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, as most of their website templates are already responsive.
You should also pay attention to your site’s load time. Mobile users will bounce off a website in as little as two seconds, so you need a speedy site.
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👉 Pro Tip: Don’t Just Test Different Devices Testing your eCommerce store across mobile phones, tablets, and desktops isn’t the only thing you need to do. It’s also important to check that your site loads properly and is easily navigated on whichever browser your visitors use. Be sure to test your website on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. |
9. Set specific goals
Goal-setting is essential for eCommerce. The problem is that most eCommerce brands set generic goals.
If you’re too general, your eCommerce management strategy won’t have a tangible direction to lead you to success.
All online stores aim to be more profitable and attract more customers. The real question is: by how much? You don’t know if you don’t track quantifiable metrics. Set more specific goals than “Increase sales this year.”
Instead, go for goals like, “Increase sales for this XYZ product by 25% in Q3.”
Setting specific goals for your eCommerce business can help to:
🏆 Provide direction
Goals help focus your efforts and resources on what’s most important, ensuring everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives.
🏆 Measure success
Without measurable outcomes, you won’t know what you’re working toward. Measurability helps you track progress, evaluate how effective your strategies are, and make data-driven decisions.
🏆 Motivate and engage your team
You’re setting clear expectations and targets for your team to aim for. Being able to achieve these goals can motivate and incentivize teams.
10. Hire an eCommerce manager
If you want to kick the strategies on this list into overdrive, hiring someone to run your online business may be the best option.
Yes, it will cost you to hire an eCommerce manager. However, a dedicated manager can help your store scale and become more profitable.
They can take the burden of eCommerce management off of your hands and tackle the time-consuming to-dos you need to check off your list.
eCommerce managers play a role in marketing campaigns, fulfillment, and can even manage inventory and your team.
Tackle eCommerce Management with Spark Shipping
eCommerce management can make your business more profitable and efficient, but it isn’t without challenges.
The good news is that you aren’t alone. The right tools will help you overcome barriers to eCommerce management so you can get ahead.
That’s where Spark Shipping comes in.
Spark Shipping is an intelligent inventory management system that uses automation to simplify vendor data, pricing, tracking, and much more.
We can even automatically purchase inventory from the vendor with the lowest price to protect your margins.
Ready to supercharge your eCommerce store? Request a demo and see how Spark Shipping can elevate your eCommerce management.