Ben Slater and WAE+ have admitted problems with their service
It is the dream of almost every company to achieve rocket-fast growth. The idea of sitting watching revenue graphs go through the roof fills most online retailers with hopeful joy. But fast growth is a powerful thing and it takes careful preparation for it to work.
When you are building your online business, there are some crucial elements that must be in place if you are to be prepared for your business to take off at speed.
When growth goes wrong
We interviewed Ben Slater, operations director and founder of online electrical store WAE+ back in November. Slater spoke of how his self-funded, one year old business would take £15 million in sales in 2013 – an impressive feat for any entrepreneur.
The stream of irate comments (scroll down for details) that followed underneath the article however, told a different story. WAE+’s inspiring growth trajectory came at a price. There were accusations of undelivered goods, poor customer service, broken parcel tracking systems and unpaid refunds.
The article went on to become one of the most popular on our site, showing that this kind of bad publicity can do untold damage to a company. Reviews from other shoppers are incredibly effective at influencing purchasing decisions. If the orders come in too think and too fast, an unprepared company can struggle to keep up and lose repeat custom.
Here are our tips on preparing for fast growth in your online store:
1. Make sure your servers can handle high levels of traffic
When websites start crashing, customers do not hang about to see when it will start working again. Dealing with unexpected spikes in traffic can be difficult but by having the right server system in place, you can avoid site downtime.
“When going through a period of high growth, it is very difficult to know how much capacity you will need, therefore many companies can end up falling into the trap of buying too many or too few servers,” says Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts.
“Buying servers in preparation for future growth is pouring money down the drain, and being unable to fulfil capacity will mean servers will crash under the strain, leading to significant revenue loss. Having a flexible IT architecture that can scale with demand is a must, making cloud the obvious choice. Using cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) means companies only pay for the capacity they use, and can scale up and down at the touch of a button.”
2. Use multiple suppliers to avoid stock shortages
Whether you are drop shipping as a method of supplying goods or holding your own inventory of stock, having multiple suppliers is a good idea – especially for your most popular products. This means that should your stock run short, you have increased the chances of being able to supply the goods when they’ve been ordered.
3. Have a robust customer service system
When something goes wrong in a customers shopping experience with you, the problem can be exacerbated by poor customer service. Many of the negative comments left on our WEA+ interview made mention of the failures of the customer service in place on the website.
When customers can’t speak to someone and get rapid responses for their queries, they understandably become irate. Having an accessible and understanding customer service system can really nip problems in the bud before they escalate.
“I appreciate Mr Slater’s enterprise in setting up an e-commerce site, but unless he improves his customer service he will continue to have many disgruntled, unhappy ex-customers,” said one of the comments on our profile about WAE+.
“Like others, I have had to wait an unacceptably long time for a refund and the service I received was appalling. You can contrast this with the excellent, helpful response you receive from retailers like Amazon for instance.”
4. Have the best possible logistics strategy in place
The communication between you, your suppliers, shipping companies and couriers needs to be water tight and as automated as possible. The process of dealing with orders and getting them shipped out needs to be as streamlined as possible to ensure speed and efficiency of delivery.
For example, when orders come in you should have them sent to your suppliers automatically at the same time as you – this saves you contacting them separately and speeds up the process. Speak to your suppliers and your delivery companies and see how they usually organise these processes with retailers.
5. Test and keep testing
“Performance needs to be forefront of mind when going through a period of high-growth,” says Michael Allen, Director of APM for technology performance company Compuware.
“Often, companies run into problems when scaling at a fast pace because their applications have not been built with performance in mind; which can lead them to buckle when placed under increased pressure. If that application is your check-out function, it can seriously impact on revenue as frustrated users dump the contents of their shopping carts and surf away to a competitor website.
“This is why it is vital to proactively anticipate and fix problems well before they impact on the user experience. To do so, you need complete visibility of the application delivery chain, from inside the datacentre right through to the actual end-user experience.
“By having this visibility, you can improve the efficiency of your applications, identify potential problems and minimise the risk of failure. Furthermore, by monitoring performance and having the ability to drill down to the exact line of code to identify where and why problems are occurring, any performance issues that do occur can be identified and resolved very quickly, significantly reducing downtime and service disruptions.”
Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”
WEAREELECTRICALS
WAE+
and I guess whatever name change comes next……….
Big Shed Trading Ltd
Big Shed Europe Ltd
You forgot the most important tip:
0. Don’t be lying thieving scum bags. Slater & friends belong in jail. Wouldn’t surprise me if someone recognised them on the street and, err, gave them a piece of their mind. In the face.
The points you make about how to achieve fast growth and have happy customers are all useful and valid. They have however nothing to do with WAE+.
The problems customers are experiencing with WAE+ are not errors of the kind you describe but deliberate attempts to use increase their revenue by advertising goods they have no intention of supplying and keeping customers money for as long as they can or hopping that the customer will give up chasing them for a refund and let them keep it.
Is this business or crime?
scan company !!! beware. they dont import your goods untill you have paid !!! meaning a month for your goods to be imported liars cheats!!!
I ordered an item from WAE+(incidentally, I fail to see the positive nature of there business) and like a lot of other customers, never received the item by the scheduled delivery time. They have a convoluted system, they give you a initial delivery window that then changes on entering your card details to a much longer period and then they fail to even meet the date they set for that.
The problem most customers have with Ben Slaters website is that it isn’t honest and upfront about the way in which it operates. If they had stated clearly, rather than buried in the Terms and conditions, that they source products from europe and thats how they can keep costs lower than everyone else BUT you may have to wait indefinitely, then Im sure they wouldnt be as popular but at least they would be truthful.
I’ve also learned, after posting an honest account of my dealings with WAE+ on trustpilot, that they have paid for fake reviews to be posted on Trustpilot and I also had my own review “removed pending investigation” which suggests that they have more than a little sway with Trustpilot when it comes to honest review being posted.
Stay well clear of WAE+ !
As I expected after my disastrous experience with WAE+ they’ve finally gone into administration. The poor customer service i received – amounting to utter contempt – can never be the basis of a successful business.
I feel sorry for all those who have goods or money owing and will now get nothing, except through bank or credit card protection arrangements. BUT it good to know that they won’t be taking anybody else’s money.
Their problems were not due to growth but due to dishonesty. A complete lack of integrity. They scam people out of their money and then refund it very very very slowly (occasionally) or not at all (typically). They deliver a small percentage of items to make it look like they might be a legitimate business that is just having growing pains. Their business model is steal and hope nobody notices.