Businesses often face pressure to set up an online presence and launch digital commerce (e-commerce) in a short time. Application leaders can deploy e-commerce quickly using a combination of social media, marketplaces and direct-to-customer commerce solutions.
Some of the key challenges for many businesses when venturing into e-commerce include:
· Assembling a cross-functional team that can operate in a collaborative, agile and effective way.
· Lack of understanding in time and options of different e-commerce approaches leading to unprepared go-to-market strategies.
· The complexity of options and vendors make selections difficult, especially when compounded with a desire to launch quickly
Businesses new to e-commerce often face pressures to go live in a short period, such as less than three months, to fend off the competition and meet customer expectations. In periods of business challenge, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations see the acute need to execute and deploy digital commerce in a few days or weeks, rather than months. Digital commerce often takes a long time to launch, as it requires collaboration from multiple functions such as marketing, sales, merchandising, supply chain, operations and IT.
There are 3 ways that businesses can quickly launch e-commerce solutions in as little as 7 days and set up the supporting business processes to ensure success.
1. Prepare: Set up your team and define your business.
· Set up your team – E-commerce requires a cross-functional team consisting of sales, marketing, merchandising, customer service, supply chain and IT. Each functional team has ownership of a part of the customer journey where they define week-by-week tasks to fulfil responsibilities. This is an efficient way to move things forward, as multiple work streams take place at the same time and each team defines its own tasks needed for the assignment.
· Along with assigning ownership, it is equally important to define the collaboration model of the team so they do not work in silos. This includes prioritising the customer experience, regular communications across teams, regular reviews of customer experience and identification of bottlenecks.
· Defining your business – A key factor of the quick launch model is to limit the scope of work using the minimum viable product (MVP) approach. This can include limiting the amount of products to begin with, focussing on s specific customer base, pick either B2B or B2C selling model to start with and focus on digital channels first.
· It is also important to define your measures upfront so the team knows which metrics to monitor. Review your metrics as the business grows and changes take place.
2. Select & Deploy: Select your go-to-market approach and deploy
Depending on your timeline there are at least three go-to-market approaches that businesses can choose from including social media, online marketplaces and Direct to Consumer (DTC) platforms.
· Social Media (around 7 days)
This is the quickest way to set up an online store and has the benefit of reaching a large audience. The limitations include a small number of products and being more suited for B2C offerings.
A number of popular social networks have introduced shopping functions for organizations to set up stores on their platforms. But the commerce function is not available in all markets. Check their instructions for available markets. Organizations would need to have a business account to set up shops and manage products and orders. This may take a few days to establish as the application is reviewed and processed by the platform. Setting up a store does not typically require much technical skill and can be managed by business users.
· Online Marketplaces
Online marketplaces, such as Amazon are popular shopping destinations in many markets. Businesses can set up online stores in those marketplaces in a relatively short period of time such as between seven and 60 days. Marketplaces may offer tools such as store template, order management, customer service, as well as services such as payment, warehousing and fulfilment. These make store setup and operations easier than the DTC approach.
While setting up these stores does not take long, a good knowledge of the marketplace rules and operations is required to run them for long-term success. This can include things like understanding the pricing policy, merchandising rules, performance ratings and product data requirements.
· Direct to Consumer (DTC) Platforms
This approach gives businesses complete control of the customer experience. Solutions such as Shopify can be set up in days to weeks. Some offer free trials while platforms such as woocommerce on WordPress are free to setup and offer basic e-commerce capabilities that allow businesses to test if the solution is right for them. There are some preparations that need to be made including:
- Defining where fulfilment with the done
- Defining delivery costs and timelines
- Defining your return and refund policies
- Developing your marketing messages and customer communication
- Preparing your FAQ pages
- Using templates where possible
- Connect online order with warehouse fulfilment
Outsourcing some of these things to service providers in the beginning can help save money and headaches in the long run. Consider a small pilot with friendly users (e.g., employees) lasting no longer than a week. Take in user feedback and review key metrics to identify areas for improvement.
3. Improve with fast iterations
Businesses using social media and online marketplaces for initial launch can consider the DTC approach for long-term benefits. Those launching DTC platforms with rapid and agile solutions on an interim basis can also move to more sophisticated platforms for advanced functionality and better integration with back-end and ecosystem applications
After launch, the team should regularly review the progress and key metrics to identify areas for improvement. Common areas to focus on include:
· Enriching product assortment based on competitive analytics.
· Offering personalized CX such as search and product recommendations.
· Improving conversion by removing friction through the purchase journey.
· Improving delivery timeliness and adjusting delivery costs or the free shipping purchase threshold.
· Adding more channels such as retail store pickup and ordering from IoT devices.
· Enabling syndication of product and order information across channels and platforms by using content syndication solutions.
· Expanding to other business models such as B2B and enterprise marketplaces.
Discard ideas that are not working and generate new ideas for testing. Customer and frontline employee feedback can be important sources of improvement ideas. As your platform stabilizes, add more functions that were excluded at the initial stage. Replicate the platform and go-to-market approaches to other product lines and markets when the model is proven.
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