Do Ecommerce the Right Way

In today’s retail environment, it’s very difficult to get by without some sort of ecommerce operations. But ecommerce is often a playground with its own rules. Those rules are very different than the brick-and-mortar rules you are used to living by. If you want to run a tight ecommerce operation, you’ve got to pay attention to the essentials. Here are 7 essentials to a robust and effective ecommerce solution with the best ecommerce software:

1. Always-on connectivity – Your ecommerce store doesn’t close its doors over night. It should always be open. That includes weekends and holidays. These are the times when most of your customers will be online buying stuff and placing orders. Ecommerce is an intrinsically 24/7 business.
2. End-to-end management – There’s more to ecommerce than simply giving people a place to order merchandise. You’ve got to warehouse that merchandise and fulfill the orders. You need an efficient way to manage prices, postage, and a host of other activities, including payroll for your employees who manage the ecommerce operations.
3. Real-time analytics – Your analytics solution should be able to tell you how many visitors you have on every page, which products are the most popular, and how much profit you are making in real time. Real-time analytics is absolutely essential.
4. Seamless fulfillment – Whether you fulfill orders out of a warehouse or off the store shelf, you need a system that can manage fulfillment from the time of the customer order all the way through to delivery.
5. Distribution – You also need a way to track your products from the time you buy them to the time you shelve them and sell them.
6. Customer relationship management – Customer relationships are no less important for ecommerce than they are for any other type of business. In fact, it may be more important to hone in on those relationships since you are not face to face.
7. Product management – From the time you buy it to the time you sell it, you need a way to manage your products and keep track of your inventory. You need a system that automatically replenishes when your inventory hits a minimum threshold. And you need to be in control of the rules.

Ecommerce is a different kind of game than brick-and-mortar retail. You can win there too with the right ecommerce software tools.