How to miss your ecommerce sales targets

Although becoming a successful ecommerce business is hard, the blueprints for getting there are relatively simple; so what are the basic ways in which you can achieve your ecommerce sales targets.

By Chris Barling, chairman of ecommerce software & services specialist, SellerDeck.

Many ecommerce businesses are bumping along the bottom, yet wondering how other companies are growing fast. Are the others lucky, or is more involved? How can you really murder your ecommerce sales targets?

I have one customer that has grown from nothing to £10m in ecommerce sales within the last three years. Obviously there’s an incredibly talented individual involved, but just what are they doing right?

My wife Kay was recently shopping online, and commented, “This site is really easy to use”, and by complete coincidence and unknown to her it was the site I mentioned. She placed an order, and I have to say every aspect of the subsequent experience has delighted her.

This got me thinking about stellar online success. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there are only a small number of requirements for a great online business.

The first is a great customer proposition

You need to ask yourself, what do your customers really want and are they getting it from the competition? If not, are there creative ways of meeting that need?

In this particular case, what people wanted was a totally predictable delivery within a narrow time slot, because the goods were heavy and arrangements had to be made to receive them. Other companies probably explained to themselves why they couldn’t do this cost-effectively, but the company in question worked out how to meet this key customer need. I won’t give their trade secrets away, but they definitely have got it right.

Yesterday, I was listening to a guy who is running a business that is rapidly becoming a household name. He was explaining how his customers asked for a particular type of product, and all his suppliers could say was that it couldn’t be done. So now he does it himself. Same point really.

The second key is service

The lesson is that if service is poor you get lots of hassle which makes fast growth pretty much impossible. You also lose sales as you won’t be recommended by customers. This is why good service is a pre-requisite for super-stellar growth.

Third is finding a big enough niche

The final requirement for rapid growth is to be addressing a sufficiently large market. I’ve blogged in the past about finding a niche where you are able to compete successfully, but this process needs to reverse when you want to grow.

So what differentiates a business with massive growth from those having moderate success? It’s not marketing, it’s having the right proposition, delivered consistently and well, into a market large enough to support growth. I wish you every success.

For more visit www.SellerDeck.co.uk