Successful eCommerce brands can give you the impression that it’s easy to set up a business – especially with the market’s rising interest in shopping for homegrown, customized products. Truth be told, it takes more hard work and self-discipline than others would have you believe.
In current times, an eCommerce business can grow faster than plants or your SIPs which can get overwhelming to handle, if you don’t know how to go about the right way. This is where the traditional workspace, hiring employees working from 9 to 5 lacks in meeting the rising demands of consumers to become its biggest shortcoming. Consumers lean towards an omnichannel eCommerce platform that can provide them with a cohesive experience across all touchpoints; be it at their physical store, or over their mobile app.
So how does an eCommerce business keep up with all the channels and support, while keeping their customers happy? The solution lies in a remote working setup.
As we grow stronger in technology, businesses equip themselves with powerful data analysis tools that can help marketers, product managers, and business owners to identify exactly what the market needs and predict growth models. Similarly, for a home-grown business owner, such tools come with promising opportunities as they help in creating an accurate plan of action essential for prioritizing their available resources and using them optimally. What may begin as a side-hustle with a small inventory and a handful of products can grow into a well-known retail brand with a massive subscriber base. But how does one get there?
In this post, we will be providing a streamlined perspective on eCommerce marketing, pointers on product sourcing, and all first steps that you would need to know about running a successful eCommerce business right from your home-base.
Everything begins with the right-work-from-home attitude. You’d need to have the right ethic and approach for setting up an eCommerce business from home. The first thing needed would be the right discipline for completing timely tasks with precision. While this might be the millionth time you’re reading about this, it’s never been more true when you’re competing with everyone else who wants to create an online business – be it millennials or baby boomers.
It is the beginning of the era where virtual offices take the front seat and physical work environments go extinct except in the manufacturing and logistics industries. With the rise of automation, the mundane regular errands are being run by smart AI-based bots for faster completion and lack of manual intervention. Apart from that globalization, building costs of real estate and transportation has also led companies to work entirely from a remote setup, for better productivity as well as being in their best interests. Now that things are in perspective, here are some of the other things you need to take care through and through:
The New York Times reports state that 43% of 15,000 working Americans say that they have spent a considerable amount of time working remotely. Therefore, a lot of brands hold credits to immense loads of work, as remote work setup makes brands have a more flexible and trustable nature. The key here lies in:
1. Working Smart
To become a successful business owner, you have to first behave like one, and that means taking responsibilities and not being afraid while setting your goals and metrics. The roadmaps for order delivery, logistics, shipments tracking, product promotions should all need to be actionable and run through extensively early on before going head-on with this. However, if you’re considering taking this on a part-time basis first, you might want to go with dropshipping where you stay as a broker between the customer and the supplier.
The customer places the order, you can notify the seller who would then ship the product to the customer and you receive a commission on each order, making it a least-hands-on system. However, if you’re someone who has unique products to sell, such processes won’t cut it and you may have to stick to private labeling or while labeling schemes. Each of these cases can buy you some time, for example, in case of private labeling, discrete products are manufactured in the factory specially for your brand and you need to dispatch orders to your customers. For white labeling, the products can’t be unique but come with packaging that symbolizes your logo as you take these to your customers.
Credits: neilpatel.com
However, all these begin with setting smart goals – first short-term and then long-term. Such goals would help you break down all the little details in your marketing timeline and can keep your focus on converting. In order to keep a better track of all the parallel activities involved in an eCommerce, a simple and powerful CRM can help you reach your targets conveniently.
2. Analyze the Target Audience
Once you’ve worked out with the first draft of the niche business model, the next logical step should be to identify the target audience and cater to their personas with the right product idea. Your customers need to identify with your products and your store needs to resonate with your product. This can only happen when your products come with an entire persona that can keep your customers intrigued.
When not taken seriously, business owners often end up losing crucial time and resources on marketing without any actual conversion. While it doesn’t mean any direct harm, it only makes the business dependent on the products that are indirectly dependent on customers. Therefore, you need to establish the foundational need in your customers for your product, and how it can solve their problems without trying too hard.
3. Investing in Customer Research
You can take reference from your competitors, analyze their strategies and work on their shortcomings to devise your product. People often use target audience and market interchangeably, but in reality they’re entirely different in characteristics. When the audience refers to an entity with specific requirements and thought process, the market is governed by a lot of additional factors like trends and technology, the former being a building block of the latter.
However for entirely new, distinct product ideas, you need to begin with learning about the right audience demographics and audience types first. As a prerequisite to handpick customer-centric products, it is impossible to proceed further without looking closer into data and analytics to understand their preferences. In current times, when brands (like Amazon, eBay) churn massive datasets everyday to deliver custom solutions and products, it is equally important for home-grown online stores to do the same before they choose revenue-generating products. In this way, there are improved chances of converting visitors compared to other competitors.
4. Unleash the True Potential of Automation
eCommerce websites work 24/7 with seamless order management and deliveries. As a beginner or small enterprise, you cannot afford to employ staff to carry out operations in all timezones. Such times call for workflow automation.
If you’re new to the industry, chances are you may or may not be familiar with this term. The premise of workflow automation is to provide an end-to-end management system that efficiently takes care of several processes in an eCommerce website – from marketing to inventory management. Having automated tools by your side, you may attain better efficiency, data accuracy, and productivity, without increasing headcount.
5. Let Your Customers Do the Talking
The essence of marketing for any brand is to interact with their customers. But, what if your customers are interacting with you about your products’ quality across multiple channels? Cool, right? For an eCommerce store, that can come with sheer possibilities – from revenue generation to massive footfalls. However, the biggest accomplishment would be the ability to connect with masses who’re promoting your products inherently, without needing any effort!
Sometimes, brands reach out to influencers and celebrities to tap into their followers’ base. However, always let your customers be your brand ambassadors for maximum trust building and booming popularity.
Conclusion
Setting up an eCommerce website from home is never easy, but neither is learning a new language for the first time. However, once you jump in and focus on driving sales to generate revenue things can get extremely rewarding with time. The revenue generated at first can be a seed investment for creating your own eCommerce marketing plan, including product optimization to finally yield large conversions.
You always don’t have to hustle, especially when there’s a smarter, actionable way to do it. If you’d like to hire someone to develop your store for you, we have some recommendations. Also, if you would like to know about some more home based business ideas that you can try in 2022, we’d recommend you to visit chatwolfs.com as they have listed the best work from home ideas that you can try to make good money.
Located in Columbus, they have a variety of eCommerce related development services, including Shopify Development.
CodeClouds
A global company giving you offshore developers with more local support, they too focus on eCommerce development. They’re a great, affordable place to hire a professional Shopify developer.
FirstPier
Located in Maine (hence the boat related name), FirstPier offers a variety of eCommerce services, and are certified Shopify experts.
