Speed Commerce’s top tips for ecommerce business owners in 2023.
With 2022 now behind us, let’s look ahead to what’s in store for 2023. Our Chief Operating Officer, Michael Manzione, recently published an in-depth look at the trends impacting ecommerce businesses.
One key theme impacting all American retailers is the economic slowdown. Economic indicators point to a slowing of the American economy, and there’s debate about whether it will be a ‘slowcession’ or recession. Plus, shoppers are heading back into brick-and-mortar stores and buying at a slower rate online.
Preparing for this sluggishness in revenue should be your top priority. Building upon Mike’s list, here are our top tips for ecommerce business owners in 2023:
- Manage your inventory carefully. Look at your inventory with a critical eye. Do you have a lot of capital tied up in inventory and just sitting on a warehouse floor? That’s doing no one any good, especially you. If that product is not moving, it’s taking up valuable space and energy to manage. Before submitting your next order, look closely at your historical sales and market trends.
- Is artificial intelligence (AI) helping or hurting your business? It seems like almost every site with online sales has an AI chatbot. Interactions with a chatbot can vary from helpful to downright frustrating. When programmed correctly, a chatbot can provide beneficial information. Other times customers are unsure of how to interact with a chatbot or the chatbot fails to understand what the customer is looking for. Is your AI customer service creating more headaches than it’s solving? With everyone moving to AI, it could be a real differentiator for your business to provide genuine human customer service.
- Update your SEO strategy. Google has updated its algorithm to prioritize helpful content and deprioritize content written by AI. Search engines want to connect users with content that gets them the most valuable answers. Your SEO strategies should include content around your products’ categories. For example, let’s say your business sells handbags. You’ll want to write articles about the product category of handbags, such as ‘how to buy handbags online’ or ‘top 10 handbags for evening occasions.’
- Optimize your mobile and social media stores. Run tests on your mobile store and optimize images, layout, and shopper journey for a frustration-free experience. Monitor your customers’ abandoned carts and identify trends that stop them from buying now. Look at your customer’s complaints for any themes in the buying experience and adjust the experience to maximize shopping checkout.
- Is it time to make your online store bilingual? One of the largest growing segments of American ecommerce is online stores in multiple languages, especially Spanish. Converting your website to another language can be tricky. You’ll want an interpreter to handle your conversion who is an expert in that language and, typically, a native speaker.
- Consider recommerce. Sustainability is an important factor for shoppers today. Return-refresh-resale and recycle-based businesses are popular and have gained acceptance even among high society. Consider adding a recommerce strategy to your business model. Can you provide a credit or a cash payment to your customers when they return used products for recycling and resale? How will you handle these products? What’s your reviving and refreshing strategy?
- Trim operating expenses. To prepare for sluggishness, you’ll need to look at all your operating expenses and see where you can make some adjustments. Ask your staff to look at areas where they can trim costs. Memberships and subscriptions can add up fast. What about your office space? Look at expenses that can be trimmed now and in the future.
- Outsource your areas of weakness to experts. You take great pride in providing your products to your customers. Sometimes, offering five-star service is out of reach. The current labor shortage has caused businesses to fall behind their competition in certain areas. Rather than try to build from within, sometimes it’s easier to outsource and let the experts handle specific issues. With outsourcing, you also gain economies of scale. For example, Speed Commerce’s clients (ecommerce retailers) save on freight since we take our entire shipping portfolio out to bid with the carriers. Those discounted rates are passed along to our clients. Another example of cost savings is that Speed Commerce offers our clients 24/7/365 contact center services, meaning we take over the customer service function for their business. Imagine the overhead of running a 24/7/365 customer service department for your business. At Speed Commerce, clients share labor costs, giving options that otherwise would have been out of reach.
The coming year looks filled with challenges, which are opportunities for you to rethink your business.
Are you interested in outsourcing your fulfillment or customer service functions? We can complement your operations with a full suite of order fulfillment solutions at scale, from direct-to-consumer (DTC) to B2B. We’re a full-service third-party logistics provider (3PL), and then some! We have a long list of custom services available. You can outsource your customer service to us, and we’ll manage your customer interaction 24/7/365. We can handle social media messages/comments, email communication, live chat, and live person calls (both U.S. and international). Let’s chat!