7 Steps to Growing your eCommerce Business Online (when starting from scratch)!

Business growth has so many anomalies. Business growth online has even more!

I’ve worked on many e-commerce businesses before but they have all been established in some way. Either they had an existing online presence (functional or not) or the business owner had been working in the industry for many years so we had something to go on. 

Back in September, we started working on a new e-commerce business from scratch. No existing knowledge of the industry, no web presence, no social media, no logo, no brand. Nothing. Nada. It’s been a really interesting process so I wanted to share a few things that I've learnt as I thought they may help you if you're going to grow your business online.

I am happy to say that we are now in the second full month of selling and things are growing nicely. Here's the story so far of how we achieve business growth on (and off) line.

Obviously, we used SCALE (our 5 step business growth methodology) but there have still been some curve balls!! Here are some things that I've learnt when starting an online business from scratch:

SITUATE 

1. Pitch to your Market - Your strategy is essential because it forms the basis of everything else. If you get this part wrong, it all goes wrong! We went for a high end site that is appealing to high earners. The brand colours, the logo and products all reflect this market choice. We went for a teal / green and a gold which give the feel of luxury and sophistication.

We chose to only use black and white images and video to keep the brand really clean and minimal. The fonts are a mix of clean and minimal and beautifully hand written:

2. Products - Find the pain points of your audience and sell them the solution. For this project, they wanted to solve the problem of people trawling through pages of cheap products to find something they want. Their customers wanted someone to do that leg work for them and only stock the best value, most reliable products. This saves them time and frustration and makes the buying cycle really fast. This site has an average time on page of 1.51 mins. This is considered very low for most eCommerce sites however, in this instance, it can be a good thing if you're still converting sales! 

COMMUNICATE 

3. Website Structure - The website is your shop window so how you communicate your brand is so important here! This site is clean with a white background and it easy to navigate. The website menu is sectioned in such a way that customers can sort, browse and filter by product (for people who know what they want to buy already) or by market (for women, for men etc. This serves the customers who need some inspiration or want to browse the range). It's important to consider all buying habits when setting up an eCommerce store as not everyone buys the same. You may not get this 100% right from the off, but it's important to structure the site how you think will work best and then analyse the data as it comes in to see what works and what doesn't work. 

4. Targeted ads - Once you have the above sorted, it's time to drive traffic. We built out a Google Ad campaign that covered all products and set the budget. We let this run for about 2/3 weeks and analysed the data. From here, we could see some ads had been limited by budget (they were very popular but had hit the cap of the spend so they had stopped delivering) and some were costing money but not converting. We moved the spends over accordingly to ensure more was spent on the popular clicks and less on the others. We also saw some common postcode areas that were converting more sales, places like Surrey and more affluent areas of London. Hoorah, the brand was working with our audience!! Take these little wins as you're going in the right direction!

This meant in month 2 (November 2019) we saw growth as follows:

Gross sales up 11.9%

New customers up 400.0%

Net volume from sales up 23.0%

Average revenue per customer up 93.7%

We will continue to analyse and improve on this over the coming months but if things continue, because of how the business behind the scenes has been structured, they are due to breakeven very soon. Not bad going I don't think. 

AUTOMATE 

5. Automation - You may think selling things is simple. It's not. We built a system that talks to their supplier so all of the sales that come through our Wordpress site automatically go to their supplier. The customer details, costs, product spec etc automatically get sent 24/7, 365 days a year without any manual work from the business owners. This integration also manages stock levels and product codes so there is no need to manually update and count stock, reducing failed orders and time spent managing the process. It also pulls in product images, descriptions and more directly from their suppliers which is eCommerce music to my ears! It saves HOURS of adding products manually and it means that new products are available instantly and not reliant on the business owner having time to add them to the site. We also integrated Facebook Chat to promote credibility into a brand new site. If you'e setting up from scratch, you'll be going up against more established businesses so be open, transparent, and build credibility where you can.

Wordpress is SO flexible so we loved working on this site. 

LIBERATE 

6. Technology not Time - This feeds into the previous point. People don't want to be spending hours doing mundane admin when technology can do it for them, especially if they don't have a detail focussed personality style. Business success is dependent on two things, leads and delivery. This is where delivery offline and your people come in.

There are 2 business owners in this business. One is an i Type DiSC personality and one is an S Type so we split the roles out to suit their strengths. The S type naturally gravitates to supporting so she takes the role of customer support, processing orders and managing the books. The I personality is creative. They enjoy coming up with new ideas to make sales, liaising with the team and project managing and in this case, designing the site, brand and marketing collateral. They also have a C type personality within this team who manages the technology side of the eCommerce platform; making changes, fixing bugs and other more focussed and detailed task areas that the i/s styles won't be as strong in.

This is the perfect split of personalities in the team and it works seamlessly for them in this business. 

ELEVATE

7. Next Steps - So, we have a market, a pain point, a brand, a range of products and a platform. Automation and technology has been harnessed, the team know what they are doing and so the next couple of months are going to be spent growing and elevating this business to the next level. The goals for this business are to break even and recoup some of the initial set up costs within 6 months of selling however, all being well, they should break even in month 3. EEEEK. 

I love this stuff! 

Love Mondays x