As an ecommerce business owner, you have decided to grow your business. But if you don’t know how to scale your ecommerce business, you risk falling behind.
But successfully scaling it has numerous benefits.
Imagine being able to offer excellent customer service to both new and existing customers, design a user friendly and fast website, engage with your target customer and understand their needs and experience the overall business growth.
This is what ecommerce scalability will do for you. It allows you to efficiently run your ecommerce business irrespective of how high or low the website traffic is.
Your online business will develop and make revenue without being hindered by its structure or insufficient resources.
Below are key strategies that will help you understand how to scale your ecommerce business efficiently and make it successful.
Ecommerce scalability is the ability of ecommerce businesses to scale to satisfy their company’s online development requirements. But there are challenges that can hinder your ability to scale up your operation.
For example, the worldwide cart abandonment rate as of 2024 stands at 70.19%. A common cause of this is slow loading pages due to high traffic or a poorly configured website.
Image via Statista
And so your ecommerce website should readily scale to go with your web business’s increasing traffic.
And what would happen if it doesn’t?
In 2023, Ticketmaster, which sells entertainment tickets online, crashed under the weight of high ticket demands. 14 million users and bots simultaneously tried buying Taylor Swift’s tickets, something the site’s infrastructure wasn’t scaled up enough to handle.
When you figure out how to scale your ecommerce business, your revenue, market size, and the number of employees increase. Your outgoings also rise—all at once.
Let’s say you have 3,000 customers, which increases to 6,000. That shows you will have to hire additional customer care and delivery employees, among other things, to help you cater to the needs of your new customers.
Therefore, as your ecommerce business expands, the expense of operating it will go up.
When scaling, in contrast, your revenue, market size, and the number of employees increase; however, your outgoings remain constant or rise slightly.
In that case, you will cater to your new customers without experiencing a rise in your expenses. Also, you will only have to hire a few customer care or delivery teams since your business operations will be automated.
A rise in revenue is attractive for ecommerce business owners, so knowing how to scale your ecommerce business should be your aim.
You have undeniably invested a lot of time and resources into creating a successful ecommerce business. Nonetheless, you still have to learn how to scale your ecommerce business.
And that’s where ecommerce scaling strategies come into the picture. With them, you can quickly scale your site.
Here are seven fundamental techniques you can employ.
Any social media platform can act as a sales funnel for your ecommerce business based on the products or services you sell.
One similar mistake that you can make here is believing that your prospective customers are identical on all social media platforms.
How customers purchase and behave varies for every social media site, and each has unique needs. Competition between brands on social media platforms is stiff, so if you fail to meet your target audience’s needs, you’ll fail to scale.
A recent study showed that a majority of 18-29-year-olds spend most of their time on YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook.
On the contrary, very few people above the age of 65 use these platforms. That said, this difference isn’t very profound for platforms like Facebook and Twitter. So, make sure you consider these differences well while choosing your platforms and crafting your messaging.
Image via PEW Research Center
Customer service is a significant factor when learning how to scale your ecommerce business. A study done by Salesforce determined that 80% of customers value customer experiences as much as the products and services offered.
What does this mean for you?
Customer feedback is essential. If your customers receive exceptional customer service, they will refer their friends and family to you, forgive a past mistake, and have confidence in your ecommerce brand. All these factors mean you can get more sales without increasing your acquisition costs, improve your customer lifetime value, and scale your ecommerce business.
Customer service is the direct connection between your customers and your ecommerce business. Poor customer service will make your business lose customers, and as an ecommerce business owner, you should focus more on customer retention and targeted marketing efforts. Else, your acquisition costs will shoot up.
Enhancing your customer service is key when considering how to scale your ecommerce business.
Here are five guidelines to improve customer service and customer satisfaction:
Knowing how to scale your ecommerce business is not enough; it’s important to consider automation to ensure optimum utilization of resources. Automation can help you get more free time for essential roles, such as developing marketing campaigns and product launches.
For instance, you can find different types of push notification services. These services will assist you to retarget abandoned carts, enable drip promotions, and drive ecommerce sales by suggesting products to your customers.
Similarly, you could use Ai chatbots to automate an aspect of your customer service, such as answering customers’ questions 24/7.
But to keep pace with the automation, you may need a strong technological upgrade as well. As you scale your business to become an enterprise, you'd have to look after more computing devices. Their automation scanning solutions can help detect any vulnerabilities in them and help you manage the devices at an enterprise level and secure customer data etc.
Another tactic on how to scale your ecommerce business is to create an excellent marketing strategy. This ensures more people get to know about your business.
Even though there is no single general marketing strategy to promote your site, there are several methods you can take into consideration to attain success. They are as follows:
When you create your marketing budget, put some money aside for paid promotions. These can be social media ads that increase your visibility on social platforms or Google Ads that can help you increase your reach on search engines.
Paid advertising is an effective technique for attracting new customers quickly as it’s highly targeted and helps you reach a vast audience as long as you’ve got the budget for it. Needless to say, it’s fairly expensive to go down this path.
Here’s an example of Google Ads launched by enterprises selling ecommerce tools.
Image via Google
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful inbound marketing method that ecommerce businesses can use to scale. It involves optimizing your site to boost its rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Optimization is done by conducting keyword research and adding the right set of keywords in your content. SEO also involves improving your ecommerce website speed, building backlinks, and optimizing structure, among other things.
The best part about SEO is that it’s relatively affordable and brings in long-term results. However, it can take some time before your website reaches the top of the search results.
Patience is key when you’re trying to figure out how to scale your ecommerce business.
Note how Mark & Spencer, New Look, and John Lewis have got their SEO right.
Image via Google
An essential aspect of scaling your ecommerce business is appealing to new customers; however, you should also strive to retarget people who know about your site but have to make any purchases.
Retargeting campaigns through Facebook and Google is an effective social media strategy when deciding how to scale your ecommerce business.
It can be easier to convince them to buy from you, considering they already know your ecommerce business. This can reduce your acquisition cost and grow your revenue, hence helping you scale your business.
The appearance of your website is vital when figuring out how to scale your ecommerce business. After all, a poorly designed website will do anything but win a visitor’s trust.
First impressions matter; therefore, designing an attractive and professional website is critical. You should use professional product pictures and offer all the relevant details that a customer needs to make a purchase confidently.
What’s more?
Your website should be user-friendly, so customers can navigate through it without much trouble and get to the products they want quickly. This means getting your structure right and implementing a powerful search functionality.
It’s equally important to ensure that your website loads quickly.
You can develop an impactful website by leveraging the best ecommerce tools. From website designing to marketing, they can help you with it all.
An example of a well-designed ecommerce website is The Horse. It uses outstanding pictures and fewer words to convey the message.
Image via The Horse
When you think of how to scale your ecommerce business, one powerful strategy is email marketing that acknowledges customers’ birthdays or anniversaries. This personal touch is likely to increase engagement with your business and strengthen relationships with your target customers, ultimately driving loyalty and repeat purchases.
A high engagement level will contribute to excellent open rates, transactions and income for your ecommerce business—all with minimal expenses.
And this works, because customers want it. In fact, a recent GetResponse study showed that personalized emails have a higher open rate (44.3%) compared to non-personalized ones (39.13%).
So capitalize on your customer data and send personalized emails to your customers to get them to buy from you again. You can try various personalization approaches to determine what works best.
An example of a personalized email is below from Puma.
Image via Really Good Emails
The next digital marketing strategy to utilize when considering how to scale your ecommerce business involves partnering up with influencers. When you collaborate with them, they bring their large, engaged following, instantly driving a surge in your reach and customer engagement and sales.
And the best part?
You don’t have to spend a fortune to work with them. Nano and micro-influencers who have a few thousand followers will be willing to work with you in exchange for free products.
What’s more?
You could even launch affiliate campaigns with them and pay them a commission only when they drive sales for you.
This makes it easy to scale your business.
The key?
Pick an influencer who has an audience similar to yours. Additionally, they should share similar values as your brand for best results.
Here’s an example of a micro-influencer, Erin (@the.girly.geek), promoting Sony’s PlayStation VR.
Image via Instagram
There’s no form of business that doesn’t come with challenges. Here are the challenges you may face, along with tips to counter them.
Q1. Is ecommerce scalable?
A. Yes it is possible to scale your ecommerce business by deploying strategies that can increase your revenue without much growth in your expenditure.
Q2. What is ecommerce scaling?
A. It is the ability to scale your ecommerce store to cater to the needs of your company’s online expansion. Ecommerce scaling is also when your revenue rises much more than your expenses.
Q3. What do I need in place prior to scaling my ecommerce business?
A. Even before you learn how to scale your ecommerce business, you should lay out a strong foundation. Some steps here can be establishing an optimized ecommerce site, selling high-quality products, and delivering awesome customer service.
Q4. What roles can I automate?
A. Some roles you can automate include customer service, email marketing campaigns, cart abandonment follow-ups, and more.
Q5. Should I have my own website to create a successful ecommerce business?
A. Even though it is not necessary for you to have your own website, as you can rely on marketplaces such as Etsy, we recommend that you design your own.
Daunting as it may look, that’s how to scale your ecommerce business the right way. You can attain your goals through planning, perseverance, and dedication. The approaches outlined in this article will help you learn how to scale your ecommerce business efficiently. How to Scale Your Ecommerce Business starts with identifying the right strategies, optimizing your processes, and consistently measuring your progress.
When you implement them, identify what is working well, what you should improve, and where you can scale. Double down on what works and you’ve got a great cycle of scaling up your ecommerce business in place.
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