Multi-million dollar businesses cannot afford to lose out on important sales that can determine the future growth of their company. The right e-commerce platform is a make or break for the success of your company. The wrong platform choice can cost economic growth.
With E-commerce steadily growing, it’s even more necessary to pay attention to the various signs that slow the performance down of your e-commerce system while consuming your time with never ending processes and integration issues.
At what point do you begin to realize that your current e-commerce system may not be the solution you need right now to take your e-commerce business to the next level? Sticking with the wrong choice of an e-commerce platform can subsequently, cost your growth not to mention deplete your resources.
Could now be the time to upgrade?
Read on for four eye opening signs that indicate you’re at a major tipping point when it comes to scaling the growth of your e-commerce business.
1- Time Consuming Integration Issues
Each week, your team is most likely interpreting data from various sources to help make sound decisions that will most likely affect business intelligence. And if your company is rapidly growing, you will need timely access to business intelligence and accurate information so you understand how your current ecommerce solution is supporting the growth in sales and profit margins.
When you’re bootstrapped by procedures such as interpreting and reformatting data from a number of systems and sources, you also put your business or company in a potential at-risk financial situation. This is because you are now finding that you constantly have to add and update new products or combine various spreadsheets together to form the right marketing or accounting report. Sounds like the ultimate headache or nightmare, right?
This eye-opening sign is indicating that your current e-commerce platform now depends on a large number of systems to satisfy a growing number of operations. The last thing you want to see happen is to lose out on a sale.
2- Exhausting Manual Process
If you’re still depending heavily on those manual processes to complete simple transactions as explained in eye opening sign #1, realize that your time is costing you. You could be making room for more higher-end projects that could scale your business more effectively.
Ideally, an integrated system should automate shipping and tracking from the moment your customers put in the order to the moment the product arrives at their doorsteps.
This way, an integrated e-commerce platform should synchronize and track your inventory along with your orders. It should also track profits and losses with an effective accounting system. An integrated e-commerce system will also provide systems to expedite customer service to cater to the growing trend of increased mobile use.
3- Outdated Systems That Don’t Allow for Growth and Expansion
E-commerce growth means acquiring new employees, developing a new product line and expanding into new niches and markets. Your new employees will now need access to higher end data systems to run daily operations such as analyzing web analytics and increasing conversions, without having to call on technical support with each problem.
An integrated e-commerce platform allows you to start small with the right systems without having to figure out each code or customization.
4- Disconnected Procedures and Processes
Business procedures and processes include marketing, sales, service as well as predictive clickfraud analytics. But growth cannot be sustained if you are aren’t using the right procedures and processes to help maintain that growth.
The majority of integrated apps include email marketing, CRM, the help desk that often come standard out-of-the-box with enterprise eCommerce solutions. Additionally, consider partnering with Quickbooks, the ERP system like SAP, Netsuite that can support additional procedures and processes.
If any of these headaches sound even in the least bit familiar, consider upgrading to a more integrated e-commerce solution that will support you as your business grows over time.
