Entrepreneurs looking to build their e-commerce business competitive agility must find effective ways to stay ahead of the curve in providing quality services to their target consumers in order to build a sustainable and profitable business. Plus, they should put considerable effort into brand building, strive to acquire and retain customers by offering a great customer experience and manage their inventory effectively. In today’s podcast, Irina Poddubnaia from TrackMage and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the strategies that can help e-commerce survive in a fiercely competitive market.
Summary
Strategies That Help Ecommerce Businesses Survive in a Highly Competitive Market
Innovative technologies such as the internet are continually affecting our traditional ways of doing things. In recent times, one must not have a brick-and-mortar store to sell goods or render services to the target customers. The term e-commerce has become a buzzword as many people are beginning to buy their products online. Many small business owners that previously operated in-person businesses are now striving to carve out a niche on e-commerce platforms to meet the needs of their consumers whose preferred means of shopping is through the internet.
The e-commerce business is growing on a daily basis and it offers marketing plenty of opportunities for small businesses. A report by Statista shows that revenue from e-commerce business in the United States was estimated at approximately 768 billion U.S dollars in 2021. Similarly, the Statista Digital Market Outlook forecasts that online shopping revenue will surpass 1. 3 trillion dollars in the U.S.
Read on as we walk you through the concept of e-commerce business and strategies that will help you survive in this highly competitive market.
What Is Ecommerce Business
Ecommerce is the practice of buying and selling products or services using the internet and transferring money and data to consummate these transactions. Ecommerce business does not often refer to the sale of physical products online, but it also describes any form of commercial transaction mediated through the internet.
However, it’s important to know the difference between e-commerce and e-business. While e-commerce refers specifically to the transaction of goods and services done online, e-business means all aspects of operating an online business.
Ecommerce occurs as business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to business.
Strategies for Building Thriving Ecommerce Business
Small business owners considering launching an online store need to understand what it takes to set up a successful, profitable e-commerce business. Below are factors that can positively affect your e-commerce business.
Branding
Branding is the process of creating a compelling positive perception of your company and its products in your customers’ minds. Effective branding differentiates your business from numerous other businesses in your niche and helps you build a loyal customer base. Your branding effort should focus on elements such as logo, design, mission statement, and putting forward a consistent theme throughout your marketing communication.
Before launching your online store, you must have a branding strategy to avoid stepping back to align your e-commerce business with your customer’s expectations. When you build a strong base, your business will be easy to relate to and offers values that resonate with the target audience. 
Here are the key steps in e-business branding:
- Understand your target customers: To build an effective brand, you should identify the factors that affect your customers’ buying decisions and leverage them. Start by asking these questions: What do they like? What motivate and attracts them? What appeals to them about your brand?
- Define your brand persona: Brand persona is an effective tool for creating a successful online business. In a nutshell, it’s the personification of your company including its gaols, how it wants to present itself to the customers as well as what it promises to offer. Use the insight you gather from your customers to build a strong brand persona that attracts customers’ attention.
- Try to be unique: Leverage your selling point to deliver quality service to your customers by focusing on how your product/ service can improve their lives. Ensure that you fulfill that ultimate promise that attracts your consumer in the first place. After all, experience has shown that 66% of consumers think transparency is one of a brand’s most attractive qualities.
- Optimize your visuals: Since online shoppers don’t have the opportunity to touch and feel the products they intend to buy, you must offer them a soothing visual experience. In other words, your brand visual assets, including website design, font, logo, and color palette, must perfectly align and work harmoniously. Undoubtedly, a memorable signature color increases the chance of your customers recognizing your product by 80%.
Customer Retention and Acquisition
You should do your best to ensure that you offer your customers a wonderful experience to retain them. It’s easier and more cost-effective to get your current customers to make repeat buying than to acquire new customers, especially in an e-commerce business where clicks and conversions are increasing in cost.
A great customer experience is vital to the success of your e-commerce business. A happy customer is likely to become loyal and, in turn, help boost your revenue. In addition, your customers should have a hitch-free purchasing journey at every touch point, and even the post-buying experience should be remarkable to make your customer want to come back.
Similarly, you should strive to acquire customers through an effective marketing strategy because you need new customers to remain in business and keep growing. You can consider a content marketing campaign, which’s a relatively cost-effective means of generating leads and making conversions.
Inventory Management
You should always have enough stocks to meet your consumer’s demands. In other words, you should ensure you have the right products at the right level and at the right time and also put in place the necessary tools that will facilitate urgent delivery deliveries of the products.
Bottom line: like a traditional business, you must put considerable effort into building your e-commerce business by implementing the factors we enumerated above. Effective marketing strategies and customer retention are critical in building an e-commerce business that can survive in a highly competitive market and generate sizeable revenue.
Learn About Our Guest
Irina is a founder of TrackMage [træk meɪʤ] software for package tracking that increases sales and customer retention by providing an outstanding post-purchase customer experience. Her journey started from running a fulfillment center in China for 2.5 years (without speaking Chinese) and went to launching a SAAS company completely remotely without external funding and running it successfully to this day.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in the cases of fraud) making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often used their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for a business investment especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.
