As brands dive into their 2023 eCommerce objectives and perhaps continue to finalise their strategic planning and goals for the year, we spent time with Paul Gedman, one of our founders, to discuss the pillars that can make an integral difference to a successful eCommerce growth strategy
Paul acknowledges the most common eCommerce challenges, and guides us through the following foundations of success; the foundations in fact that underpin everything we do at eComplete:
1) eCommerce Talent
The supply and demand issue of eCommerce talent presents challenges to eCommerce brands that would otherwise be destined for growth. The speed in which eCommerce originally took share from retail has had everybody on the back foot, and the more recent speed of shifts to video first, privacy challenges, GA4, TikTok, AI (and of course Chat GPT3), mean we have a lack of global experts; talent is required to learn quickly and adapt as the industry disrupts.
Now more than ever we see businesses lack the cash flow to invest in highly experienced teams. To counteract talent issues, businesses have no choice other than to enlist multiple agencies, which lead to fragmented teams; siloed data, miss-aligned objectives, poor communication, missed opportunities and underperformance overtime.
We built eComplete with this challenge in mind, we help direct-to-consumer businesses remove agency reliance, optimise performance, reduce cost, and rebuild teams in-house.
2) eCommerce Global Infrastructure
Economic and current global market conditions are as tough as they have ever been, supply chain and freight costs, increasing CAC and payroll increases are putting pressure on businesses to look at cost saving initiatives.
Most direct to consumer businesses will cut marketing spend, and payroll but rarely think about fulfilment and delivery which typically has a higher cost than marketing and payroll combined.
We’re passionate about supporting disruptive growth for businesses, starting with operational cost-saving, eComplete’s global supply chain product exists to support businesses with a global platform, previously only accessed by eCommerce giants.
3) eCommerce Data
The gift of eCommerce is being able to see how multiple initiatives perform; enabling fast learning and reactivity to adapt strategies to what’s working and importantly what isn’t. Unfortunately, we see so many direct-to-consumer businesses struggle with their data infrastructure, resulting in misinformed eCommerce strategies.
There are multiple examples of this:
Poor tagging: We especially see this in channels such as affiliates, social and influencer. Poor tagging results in biased views of performance, which don’t truly reflect the customer journey and sale conversion, effectively leading to misinformed strategy and initiatives.
Siloed data: Siloed data from multiple agencies, alongside a lack of budget results in data and performance becoming ring-fenced and you lose the ability to learn, react and strategise based on the full picture.
Data infrastructure (Data set-up and reporting): Data infrastructure and reporting is too often overlooked early on and never addressed, businesses become attached to seeing (or are wrongly motivated) to show various data points in a preferable way. A data reset is difficult but very often essential and many tools and services make this more accessible and importantly more low cost today than it was a few years back. If you don’t have one single view of your D2C business from stock to customer reviews, businesses can never capitalise on their true potential.
eComplete exist to support eCommerce businesses with eCommerce acceleration strategies that plug into and enhance existing infrastructure. Provided through data driven consultancy, eComplete can plug strategic support into existing teams, as well as supporting internal infrastructure set-up through talent, data, recruitment, and global infrastructure solutions.
To find out how to implement the above solutions for success, get in touch today.