Growing a successful e-commerce business has never been easy. Nowadays, considering the competition, it is harder than ever. Like any business, there are always hundreds of things to do, yet just so much time and money to go around. Also, if you have made strong plans to handle these issues, emergencies will derail you. It is difficult to Find a balance between the things you should work on versus the things you really end up working on. But amongst all of these to‐dos screaming for your attention, there are a couple of components that matter significantly more than others. If you get these things right, you get an unfair advantage over your competitors. So how would you realize which factors are affecting e-commerce success the most?
Your Most Important Tasks:
You can find the clues by looking at successful ecommerce businesses. These are characteristics that this business share. However, they often aren’t visible on the surface, to discover them you’ll have to dig a bit. Because a successful online business has 1M Instagram followers, doesn’t imply that following Instagram will get you those equivalent results. So you need the root causes of success, not its by‐products to know where your time will be spent most proficiently. Here are the three most important factors affecting e-commerce success.
- Low customer acquisition cost
- High repurchase rate
- Healthy margins
Low customer acquisition cost
Getting boatloads of profitable customers for cheap is the holy grail for most e-commerce businesses. How low will be low enough principally relies upon your preferred margin, lifetime esteem, and your competitors. The biggest part of this cost is the marketing expense to get another client. If you’re not effectively spending money on things like promoting, each new client still has a cost. At first, you can get away with simply spending your own time. However, if your business is progressively settled, you will probably hire experts or staff to do the marketing for you.
High repurchase rate:
Repeat orders are what the most successful stores are built on. Research by RJmetrics uncovered that the best e-commerce companies create a greater part of their complete income from repeat clients following 20 months. And it starts contributing more to revenue than new customers afterward. This factor builds the lifetime esteem for your e-commerce customers, which is incredible for benefits. Client loyalty is something that the sum of a lot of important parts. client experience, item selection, evaluating, brand, and showcasing. The most common approach to increase customer loyalty simply gets more in front of your existing buyers. Automated email campaigns can do exactly that. However, if a customer had a poor experience when they initially purchased, your campaigns will fall on deaf ears.
Healthy margins:
A healthy gross margin makes your e-commerce business easier to run. (As a benchmark, a Marketing Sherpa survey discovered gross margins averaged between 22% and 38%). It gives your space to invest, offers more possibilities to acquire customers. This important factor is made up out of two numbers, income and cost. Minimizing expenses should be a priority for the business, especially early on.
