Starting an eCommerce site is just half the battle. The other half is growing your business. As your sales start to skyrocket and your website starts generating more traffic, you will need to double the effort. If expanding your in-house team is not an option for your cash-strapped company, you should consider outsourcing certain business processes. There are things every eCommerce business should outsource.
Here are a few areas your eCommerce business should outsource.
Website Design
In 2020, customer experience is more important than price and product. No matter how quality your products are if your website takes forever to load or its navigation is too complex, visitors will leave it immediately.
To engage visitors and encourage them to convert and come back, you need to keep your eCommerce website user-friendly. That means it should be fast, responsive, visually appealing, and trustworthy. And, to get the most out of website design, you should hire a professional designer.
There are many platforms you could register on, including Behance, 99designs, Freelancer, Upwork, where you can register to find freelance designers. If you are looking for long-term collaborations, you can also hire a reliable web design agency.
DevOps
DevOps is not a technique, a tool, or an employee with a specific set of skills. DevOps is an approach to doing business with a simple goal – to break down the barriers between your teams.
DevOps connects your sales, marketing, customer support, product development, and technology operation departments and ensures better collaboration between them. By adopting the DevOps mindset, you will improve employees’ performance, minimize the efficiency gaps between your teams, automate many processes, and shorten the product development life cycle.
Sure, finding an experienced DevOps engineer that understands different aspects of your business is challenging. According to DevOps Institute, 50% of companies struggle with managing people, operations, and tools associated with the DevOps transformation.
That is why you should consider outsourcing DevOps to an experienced agency. They already have the manpower and tools needed to increase your teams’ productivity, innovation, and creativity.
Bookkeeping
If there were one aspect of your job you should outsource, it would be bookkeeping. Monitoring how your company’s money moves may be challenging. This process requires mountains of paperwork, knowledge, and a high level of accuracy.
If you have at least some bookkeeping experience or you have already hired an in-house accountant, then consider investing in bookkeeping software. Tools like QuickBooks or FreshBooks will help you automate many aspects of your financial management and, yet, save money.
All you need to do is monitor your financial performance and read reports, while someone else will get the numbers right for you. Lastly, you need to integrate proposal software, which can help automate payments and billing and streamline collaboration with your bookkeeping service providers.
Order Management
There is a wide range of cloud-based inventory management and order management tools that will help you stay on top of your orders. However, to use this software properly, you need to understand different aspects of order processing, such as order validation, placement, refunds, cancellations, and inventory management, etc.
Managing orders requires accuracy, knowledge, and patience. Unfortunately, as a startup owner, you will not be able to pour enough time and effort into analyzing inventory data, writing reports, and processing mountains of documentation. That is why you should hire a dedicated professional or use a service like Inventory Lab to do that for you.
Customer Service
Online customers are tech-savvy. No matter if they are browsing through your social channels, calling your customer service agents, or shopping on your website, they expect you to provide immediate and relevant customer service.
If you already have an in-house customer support team, then consider investing in flexible, all-in-one customer relationship suites. For example, SaaS business phone systems allow you to communicate with customers on any channel they use. They also integrate with your CRM software, letting you analyze call data and create comprehensive customer profiles. When a customer calls your support team, the system will display their information in real-time and recommend how your agents can help them.
Once your business starts expanding, consider using a hybrid approach to customer service. To simplify your agents’ jobs, hire a third-party firm to handle your call center, live chats, and email support. Just make sure the firm meets industry legal and security requirements. Above all, you should keep your outsourced customer service on-brand – customers are used to the way you communicate with them.
Digital Marketing
For any eCommerce business, digital marketing is an opportunity to improve brand awareness, gain customers’ trust, and boost sales. Your goal is to build a consistent and on-brand online marketing strategy that will reflect your values and missions.
Now, as with any other aspect of your business, building an in-house digital marketing team is complicated. First, remember that digital marketing is broad. It consists of many fields, including:
- SEO
- SEM
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Copywriting
- Email marketing
- Analytics and reporting
- Lead generation
- Reputation management
Therefore, you cannot hire 1-2 people and expect them to deliver exceptional results. Instead, you need to hire an entire team of people with different skills, experiences, and areas of expertise. Second, you would need to equip your team with a wide array of digital marketing tools.
If your limited budget cannot support this strategy, consider outsourcing digital marketing services to freelancers or a marketing agency. Remember that freelancers are individuals who usually specialize in a particular field of marketing. Hiring a freelancer for each digital marketing area may be expensive and could potentially harm your brand presence. Therefore, exploring the option of outsourcing to a marketing agency can provide a more comprehensive solution, ensuring expertise across various aspects of digital marketing while potentially being more cost-effective.
An agency, on the other hand, hires teams of professionals and has the tools needed to cover different aspects of your digital presence. Most importantly, they will make sure your brand remains consistent across all channels.
Over To You
For a young eCommerce business owner, your goal is to stand out in a competitive market. To focus on what you are passionate about – creating and selling killer products – you should outsource many complex operations that would eat up lots of your time. I hope this list will help you grow your eCommerce business faster.
