January 2021

Your goal as a small business is to make money, as it is the goal for any business of any size. Most companies care about their eCommerce business growth, and for this, they need to be aware of their customers and give back to the community. Without a sustainable model for making more money, a company will not survive – it’s basic math!

Drive Business Growth

Revenue models are going to help you to better drive eCommerce business growth. These are the means by which a business plan can make more money, and it can be fairly complex or it can be basic. On this plan, you’ll take into consideration your manufacturing, purchasing, marketing, distribution, and other costs. All of these considerations will be marked until your business arrives at a profit. It’s the best way to look at the revenue structure of your business, and there are a variety of common business revenue models for eCommerce business growth. The most common ones include:

1. Manufacturer. Creating a product with raw materials or assembling components to create a product is the goal for a manufacturer.
2. Distributor. Distributors work to purchase products from the manufacturer and sell them to a wholesaler. The distributor handles passively received orders and promotes products to find new buyers.
3. Wholesaler. A wholesaler will work closely with eCommerce retailers to ensure that their needs are accommodated. They’ll buy bulk products at discount prices, fulfilling orders as well as they can.
4. Retailers. Purchasing from wholesalers and distributors, retailers will then sell products to the public.
5. Franchise. This model has an entrepreneur paying for the rights to sell a product under the name of a franchise.

Five Common eCommerce Revenue Models

• Sales Revenue. Profits are gained by selling products or providing services. This is alongside a brick and mortar business working online. Any business that sells online is following a sales revenue model, and this tends to be the basic way to earn money, even if there are more streams of income happening in that moment.
• Advertising Revenue. Right now, the options for advertising as a business are pretty endless. You can get online with media sites and pay for advertising with pay-per-click, or you can choose to utilize your social media and advertising for free. These are the more palatable options for small businesses given they want to earn money, not spend it!
• Subscription Revenue. A company offering subscriptions is a popular one. It goes beyond streaming subscriptions like Netflix and includes things like Hello Fresh and Gousto. If you can offer something for people to enjoy for a recurring monthly fee, you’re going to better ensure that you have a stream of customers coming in.
• Transaction Fee Revenue. For every time your customers make a transaction on your platform, you can do a transaction fee and earn money that way. Fees aren’t much, but if you have a lot of customers it soon adds up!
• Affiliate Revenue. This model relies on influencers on social media to promote and sell their product. The concept is based on sharing revenues and it is a very attractive model to use.

Whichever revenue model you choose, you need to understand both the customers you have and their expectations of you. Look at your current resources and find the realistic model that works for you. ShipJoy is here to help your eCommerce store scale it’s business through order fulfillment solutions.

It’s so important that as a business, you know how to save money. Sure, spending it is a great plan if you have a purpose for it, but 2020 was a beast of a year for small businesses. Many of them folded due to overspending and debt, and the pandemic on top of that didn’t help matters at all. Many businesses in the service sector no longer operate, the pandemic closing their doors and leaving them with huge revenue losses as a result. The ripple effect from here was remarkable, with many businesses left trying to find new ways to save money as fast as possible.

As a small business, you need to save as much money as possible if you hope to stay afloat. You don’t want a business unable to continue with order fulfillment due to poor money management, so let’s talk about some of the different ways that your small business can save some cash.

Advertise, Advertise, Advertise

It’s important – as a small business – that you are able to grow your revenue. The more revenue you have, the more potential your business will have in the future. You don’t want your business to fail, and when you swap your advertising to social media and content marketing, you are going to be able to do that. Sure, traditional media such as television and print are great options, but there has to be a line for your marketing. You need  good strategy and for your small business to be relevant, saving money on print advertising in favor of cheaper social media advertising will help!

Cut IT Costs

2021 is the year for cutting out all of those unnecessary IT costs. It’s nice to experiment with different software types, but the goal is to streamline your usage and take down too much to overcomplicate your IT strategies. Many businesses are relying on the cloud for their software backup, and if the software is useful, keep it, but if it’s not bringing you any help or support, then drop it and save yourself the cash.

Offer Flexible Working

The biggest way to save money as a small business is in your premises. You will need somewhere to carry out order fulfillment, but do you really need a head office filled with people? Probably not! You need to offer your staff remote working, because when you do you will save on cleaning staff, utilities, rental costs for the office and more. Without a physical office, you make instant savings.

Stop Splashing The Cash

It’s obvious that last year was chaos for most businesses, but spending money on things you do not need is reckless in a time where you are supposed to be saving cash! Scale back your budget and don’t spend money on anything your business doesn’t necessarily need. It’s not worth running low in your business expenses when you should be saving them back as much as possible.

Your business needs to save money and as a small business, growth should be your main goal!

2020 was not the best year for businesses, but the positive thing about 2020 is that we all learned how to adapt and change with the things we had to face. Many businesses upgraded their brick and mortar stores to an online eCommerce platform instead, and they found great success with it. Given that we are in a digital world right now, it makes total sense that we would find success online in business, and an eCommerce store is an easy way to realize your dream of business continuity. It doesn’t take long to make an online store, but do you know how to work out your marketing strategy? Well, Market Research for eCommerce Stores is where to begin!

Market research is going to help you to figure out what people are willing to spend their money on. You cannot sell something that people don’t want, and your market research strategy is going to help you to pinpoint what people DO want and whether you are on the right track with your options. Without market research, you could end up spending a lot of money on offering products and services no one wants, and because you didn’t check, it’s money down the drain. Market Research for eCommerce Stores is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle for getting your business off the ground properly, but what are the most basic steps? We’ve got them for you below to help you to conduct market research thoroughly.

Know Your Why

It starts with knowing why you’re doing your market research in the first place. You need to be aware of what you want to get out of your market research, as without a purpose for it, it’s just a waste of time and money. Planning your research properly means you need to write out your goals and this takes some forward-thinking. You shouldn’t begin to conduct any research until you know your why.

Figure Out Your Tools

There are plenty of ways that you can carry out marketing research and once you understand your tools, you can use the right methods to do it. From focus groups and surveys to interviews and observation, you can ensure that you have the right techniques in place to get the answers that you truly need for your product or service.

Figure Out Your Audience

It’s so much easier to find an existing audience to serve with your Market Research for eCommerce Stores than it is to create a product based on the needs and desires of an audience. Getting to know who your target audience is is vital here, and you can do this by working out their location, what they’re interested in, their income, and more. The point is to get to know them. Once you do, you can push your marketing strategy properly.

Figure Out Your Niche

There are infinite options available for a product or service, and you want to be the best of those options. If you know that you have a niche that you can serve, figure out where that is and shine.

A reputation for a business is not something that is built overnight. It takes careful planning and time to get a reputation for a business off the ground. With the advent of the internet and the evolution of the digital world, brand reputation can change in an instant – and that is not always a positive thing. Everyone has an opinion and no matter how good the marketing tactics of a business, it’s the personal opinions of the people who have experienced a service that will count. You want your business brand reputation to soar, and reputation management for ecommerce is vital to making this happen.

A company that invests in brand reputation management for eCommerce is a company that cares what people think – and rightly so! If you care about the opinions of your customers, you are going to be sure that you are positively influencing those customers and you know that you can do better to offer a good service for them. Online reputation management will help you to control and improve the way in which your brand is perceived by your customer base. Whether you do this internally or you hire an expert to do it for you, Reputation Management For eCcommerce is vital to your continued brand success. But how do you do it? How do you improve your brand’s reputation?

Let’s take a look at several things that you could be doing.

What’s In A Name?

Before you get going, it’s important that you know what’s already out there about your business. You need to Google your business name and any important people within the company, and you then need to understand whether the reviews are good or bad. It’s much easier to position your brand online if you know your starting point. 

Stake Your Claim

Every single domain owned by your business is going to help to be a barrier against any negative results. Setting up social media accounts across all channels is vital as you can move the negativity away from page 1 of Google and get your brand out to as many networking sites as possible. It’s not so much about using these platforms as it is about blocking the way for anyone else to use them to disrupt the message your business wants to send out.

Get Established

Your brand needs to be established online, and if you have a personality for your brand offline through excellent work, you need to make sure that you can bridge this throughout the digital terrain. The first step here is making sure your business has the order fulfillment infrastructure in place to satisfy your customer base. ShipJoy can make sure all your fulfillment needs are met on time and done right the first time.

Be Present

Next, you want to keep to a regular posting schedule that will ensure that you remain active online. The more active you are, the more relevant you’ll be to your audience. You can create engaging content that will mean something to your audience and your future audience. Everything is relevant, from vlogs and blogs to quizzes and infographics.