Why Ecommerce Growth Typically Happens Beneath The Surface
Your campaign launches, orders begin pouring in, and for approximately an hour, it seems like all evidence indicates that you’ve made progress. Then the support Inbox gets full, incorrect addresses, missing items, people who are frustrated because the tracking number isn’t showing anything. The growth was genuine. So were the problems that occurred beneath the surface.
The Space Between Your Order Volumes & Your Operation Capabilities
A majority of e-commerce companies aren’t designed for the volumes they end up getting. Rather, most e-commerce companies are developed for volumes of 20 per day (or whatever number) and are subsequently enhanced through patches and band-aids as traffic increases. At 200 orders per day, the same process will fail to provide adequate results. Similarly, when spreadsheets that used to keep track of inventory levels accurately now cause employees to question the validity of those numbers, the company knows there’s a serious issue. This doesn’t appear as a singular catastrophic event. However, it appears as an ongoing collection of minor fixes until the inevitable happens, a busy week occurs, and the amount of “slack” within your operation becomes apparent.
Where Stock Counts Become Unreliable
Inventory visibility is typically the first casualty. When manual updates occur or stock counts are updated across a single sales channel, the discrepancy between what your system reflects and what is physically available in your store grows exponentially after each order. You sell out-of-stock products. You hold onto inventory you didn’t realise you had. Both appear to be isolated incidents. However, both create financial losses and damage consumer trust equally.
How Shoppers See Things Differently Than You Do
Customers cannot see your warehouse, nor your spreadsheets, nor the conversations internally regarding switching carriers. Customers only see if a package arrived, if it was correct, and if anyone informed them during the shipping process. These are issues customers see immediately, and long before you’re aware of operational strain occurring. By the time you notice the complaints piling up, the root cause of the problem has been present for weeks.
How To Bring In Outsourced Assistance While Maintaining Oversight
At this juncture, many entrepreneurs look beyond themselves (and hard work) to find solutions to resolve these challenges. Collaborating with a UK ecommerce fulfilment provider can remove packaging, picking, and shipping from your list of responsibilities while maintaining visibility into stock counts and orders, so long as both parties use systems that communicate properly, rather than using separate systems bolted together. The objective is not to relinquish control over responsibility; it is to release the mental energy needed to operate the business.
What Stands The Test Of Time
Businesses that successfully grow without collapsing generally share a commonality, they were created with variability in mind, rather than simply providing an optimal experience for the average day. That includes real-time access to stock information, defined ownership of each element within the customer journey, and fewer instances where an employee needs to remember to perform some task manually. There is no glamour in creating reliable systems. Reliable systems are simply well-designed systems.
If growth has begun to feel less enjoyable than chaotic, it does not necessarily mean you are conducting e-commerce incorrectly. More likely than not, it merely indicates that the operating systems below your business have not yet evolved to meet the new standards you’ve established since launching your initial business. That is a problem worth resolving before your next busy week arrives.
