What Hinders Brands from Scaling their Ecommerce Business?
Since the beginning, ecommerce has changed the retail landscape, extending great opportunities for businesses of all sizes. But the challenge is not the same for everyone. For a promising startup, scaling an online shop to an ecommerce behemoth is fraught with difficulties, whether financial and logistical. This SEO Premier Blog takes you to the journey toward uncovering common obstacles that hinder ecommerce brands from achieving growth. Let’s discuss them one by one:
Inventory Management Challenges
As product lines expand, managing stock levels across multiple warehouses or fulfilment centres becomes complex. This is the struggle many scaling brands face that sometimes impede them from attaining growth. The litany of problems include rising shipping costs, disorganised order routing, and sloppy inventory management.
For example, ecommerce retailers that have a presence on Amazon. eBay, and Walmart could use a feed management solution that pulls in orders from those big ecommerce platforms as well as translate data across multiple channels, which ensure that inventory levels are accurate, updated, and processed in a centralised enterprise-level system. All these contribute to customer satisfaction!
When you have your inventory in apple pie order, you will be spared from overselling during peak promotion seasons. You can also control how much merchandise is displayed in the marketplace, as well as manipulate demand for both slow- and fast-moving products.
Unauthorised Sellers and Distributors
You know what they say, always the trees that bear fruit are stoned. One indication of success in ecommerce businesses is when they can’t keep in line unauthorised sellers and distributors of their products.
One way to approach it is to gatekeep their intellectual property by applying for trademarks with online marketplaces, regardless if they sell there or not. This act gives them full control over product listings that show their trademarked products in those sites.
Adding More Channels
Another struggle is expanding your brand’s presence to new shopping destinations, which require resources on learning the ins and outs of the new platform, its interoperability to your existing systems, and the actual work of having to integrate to it. It also takes additional manpower and technology to maintain product listings on those channels.
Like the suggestion above, it’s best to integrate with a single product feed management platform that has direct connections to these channels and provides dedicated support. It must have nifty data synchronisation capabilities to keep product info updated, which in turn reduce pricing discrepancies that sometimes lead to seller account penalties.
Lack of Resources
As the volume of orders increases, ecommerce business owners may face a slew of order fulfilment challenges like manual order processing, packing, sorting that sometimes can be time-consuming and prone to errors. The higher the demand for your products, the greater these inefficiencies will be magnified if your business is unprepared to handle them.
Moreover, in the force majeure events like pandemic, natural disaster, and geopolitical tensions, they must grapple with supply chain disruptions in the form of inventory shortage, delayed deliveries, and increased costs of transportation.
While the challenges are substantial, upcoming ecommerce businesses can overcome these hurdles by investing in technology, optimising their operations, and prioritising customer experience. By addressing these issues, they can pave the path for sustained success and scale their operations to great heights.
