3 Secrets That Can Help You Expand Your e-Commerce Business!

The world of online shopping has been booming with people flocking to e-commerce sites to buy everything from groceries to even cars. This is a changing world where brick and mortar stores are rapidly being replaced with their online equivalents and the potential for growth here is staggering.

However if you are a small e-commerce business looking to expand and take advantage of this large boom in interest there are a few things that you need to keep in mind as you go about the expansion process. What exactly are these secrets, well we are going to reveal them all to you in this piece and by the end of it you’d be well on the way to achieving exponential growth on your e-commerce platform of choice!

1. Invest In Proper Inventory Management Systems

One of the biggest headaches for e-commerce websites has always been managing their inventory and creating a balance between having enough products at hand and not going overboard with warehouse and other related storage expenditures. Now while it is possible to do inventory management manually, it is often very resource as well as time intensive endeavour. In fact if you have used Shopify inventory management tools, you’d understand that how woefully under developed they are for handling large scale production lines. While it may work fine for dropshippers, for anyone who is manufacturing their own products, a more robust inventory management system is sorely needed. This is where services like Katana come in as they help automate much of the menial tasks and can help you keep track of all your current orders as well as give you a broad overview of how your entire production line is performing at any given moment. This is vitally important if you are looking to expand your production capacities as a fault if left unchecked can lead to catastrophic consequences in the long run!

2. Use Your Social Media

The new age millennial spends most of their time on social media and since this is where most of the target demographics for online e-commerce stores lie, it is vital that you have a strong presence in every major social media platform. However, if you just use your social media handles for promotion you are losing out on one key metric and that is customer interaction. Retaining customers is one of the biggest pain points for any e-commerce portal and the best way to get your customers to keep coming back for more is if you engage with them through your social media. Disgruntled customers may often take to sites like Twitter and Facebook to voice their grievances and it is imperative that you follow up on these complaints and work with them for a fast solution. This way your customer base expands and trust in your brand name gets established.

3. Use Referral Programmes and Affiliate Links

Everyone starts off small but that doesn’t mean you can’t take the help of someone who has a bigger reach just to get the word out about your products and e-commerce site in general.. This is why social media influencers are one of the top ways to increase your customer base. Running an affiliate programme makes sure that everyone who promotes your site or products in them gets a small kickback for every sale which means that you get to have wider reach without really spending a lot of money!

Tying into this, we also have referral programmes - these are a great way to give back to your loyal customers and also include them and their social media circles into your growing customer base.

At the end of the day, expanding a business and pouring more money into advertisement as well as infrastructure is a risk but then given the state of e-commerce as it is right now, it is well worth taking that risk as chances are with these 3 secrets by your side, you’re almost always gonna end up coming on top. In fact none could have said it better than the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself,

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”