As an eCommerce Retailer, What is my Core Competency?

What do I spend my time doing as an eCommerce retailer?

If you’re like many eCommerce retailers managing an on-line store, you’re filling orders, packing, shipping and responding to customers.  This comprises most of your day.  You may think that this is what differentiates you from the competition and that providing service to your customers is your core competency.  Maybe if you are Amazon, this is true.  However, for most eCommerce retailers, better, faster, cheaper service can be outsourced.  eCommerce fulfillment houses specialize in fulfillment.  This is their core competency.  They have money invested in people, training and systems to be the best at fulfillment.

What would you do with yourself if you didn’t spend so much time fulfilling your orders?  

Here are 20 things you could be doing to grow your eCommerce business.

Growing your business!  Think of all the improvements to your eCommerce website that you just never seem to be able to make.  Analyzing buyer behavior, improving your check out process and coming up with new and special offers for you returning customers are all things you could (and should!) be doing.  Your core competency as an eCommerce retailer is MARKETING.  Here are some suggestions:

1. Analyzing the keywords customers find you on and targeting your pages better for search engines.
2. Writing blogs and content targeted at your potential customers.
3. Doing an email campaign with a special offer to former customers.
4. Tracking cart abandonment (people who create a cart but don’t complete the order).
5. Finding ways to reduce cart abandonment and/or re-targeting cart abandoners.
6. Coordinating the messaging on social media.
7. Writing guest blogs aimed at your target audience on other people’s blogs.
8. Setting up/managing your Google Adwords campaign to drive more traffic or lower cost per acquisition.
9. Improving pictures, videos and descriptions of your products to increase conversions.
10. Finding and adding new and better products to your store.
11. Write “how to” articles and videos that helps your clients decide what to buy and how to use your products.
12. Set up a Google Shopping campaign (product display ads).
13. Add your site to “shopbot” or similar shopping sites.
14. Set up a Google Re-marketing campaign to display ads to previous website visitors.
15. Explore traditional advertising media channels:  magazine ads, direct mail.
16. Set up a facebook advertising campaign.
17. Getting links back to your website from relevant web directories to help with your search ranking.
18. Joining on-line forums that are related to the products you sell and becoming an expert there.   This is sure to drive traffic and sales to your site as well as, build connections.
19. Review your Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you have no crawl errors or missing pages on your site.
20. Use a service like SEM Rush to compare how you are doing in search vs. your competitors and what the best keywords are.

Dare Marketing Can Help

Dare Marketing is an expert fulfillment house based in the Toronto Area in Canada.  We specialize not only in intra-Canada fulfillment but cross-border fulfillment into the US from Canada.  If you’d like to free up more of your time to grow your business and are considering outsourcing.  Contact Dare Marketing today for a free consultation.