Being an e-commerce startup entrepreneur, challenges come gifted as soon as you kickstart the e-commerce business with all e-commerce solutions. We often see companies tussling with them without any principle to embark upon agile transformations to achieve desired objectives.

Based on our experience across numerous e-commerce operating models, we see the following most common challenges faced by e-commerce businesses of all sizes.

Product Sourcing- Choosing the Right Product

Product sourcing refers to finding and buying products at a real wholesale price and selling through your business online for a profit. This comes as the most initial and challenging task to tackle when starting an e-commerce marketplace.

If you’re just invading into online retail sales, you’d have a clear picture of sourcing products and its various techniques that give the best profit margins.

There are five major types of sourcing techniques:

1. Drop-shipping – Dropshipping is a process where your wholesaler stores all the products you offer on your website. When you make a sale online, the wholesaler is responsible for shipping the product directly to your customer. Your customer pays you the retail price listed on the website, and you pay the drop shipper your wholesale price. This way online retailers can benefit from dropshipping.

2. Light bulk – A term coined at WorldwideBrands.com, it allows you to buy products from your wholesale supplier in small and affordable quantities. Here you’re in charge of warehousing the products and shipping them to your customers.

3. Volume Wholesale – Contrary to Light Bulk, in Volume Wholesale you can buy products from a wholesale supplier in large quantities and you’re responsible for handling storage and shipping.

4. Importing – When you buy goods from manufacturers in other countries in a large amount, with cheap production.

5. Liquidation – When you purchase merchandise in bulk from reclamation centers or B2B auction websites.

Key Takeaway:

• DropShipping is the most used and proven method for new sellers to start with for Product Sourcing.
• It eliminates shipping and storage issues and any inventory investment.

If in case you’re a new beginner or don’t opt for dropshipping than here are a few.

Tips and techniques for inventory management:

• Set par levels of the products i.e. minimum amount of products that must be present all times.
• Practice FIFO (First-In First-Out) for non-perishable products.
• Prepare and plan for unpredictable situations.
• Do regular auditing.
• Make a breakdown of products with a low, moderate, and high frequency of sales.

Segmentation and Buyer Personas

Customer segmentation means breaking your customers into groups of like buyers who have similar characteristics and making a strategy for each group. Buyer Persona is a method of customer segmentation that in simple definition by HubSpot can be defined as the “fictional characters created to represent the different buyer types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might engage with a site, brand or product similarly.”

When it comes to the e-commerce marketplace it is a very head-scratching task and not at all an easy feat to segment customers. It is hard to scale, optimize, and maintain different buyer personas.

Tips and techniques to segment customers:

• Define your personas broadly. Don’t bifurcate them at a very granular level initially otherwise, you’ll end up in marketing and acquisition strategy. Rather drill them down in collecting persona details and knowing your customers closely. You can do your customer research by utilizing tools and bringing them all together.

Generating Targeted Traffic

As soon as you plunge online, “be everywhere” online is mandatory. Expanding your reach & word of mouth on one or more platforms seems to be the only way out. Well, maybe not. Focusing on one single channel keeps your all resources on a single point-– especially when you’re a new beginner.

Just a little homework before you opt for a user acquisition channel-> Identify your target audience. Create a marketing campaign that targets your customer persona, run it with your own small budget and cross-verify the engagement by tracking the click-through rate via website analytics.

• User Acquisition Channels – Find and identify your own user acquisition channel through the following steps. Take it from the Growth Marketing Conference.
  • Understand common growth channels
  • Identify your competitive advantages
  • Pick your top 1-3 channels
• Digital Marketing – Digital Marketing channels are the most powerful engines to drive traffic to your online store. Activities like SEO, PPC, email, display ads, social media marketing, retargeting, and affiliates help in driving quality traffic to the online website.

Customer Retention

In an online e-commerce marketplace, it is easier and less expensive to retain customers than to acquire new ones. To woo your customers and bring them back for more, you need to set your sales goals and map your customer journey by analyzing the questions that lead to a purchase. Understanding how retailers can compete with ecommerce also begins with improving customer retention through personalized experiences and smarter engagement strategies. You can ponder over questions like:

• How your customers did become aware of your e-commerce website?
• Do you get a lot of referrals?
• Are your customers following you on social media?

Once you know your customer journey, start applying your lead acquisition strategy that works best, optimize it on each step and improve customer retention in the process.

Choosing a Long-term Technology Partner

When you head towards running a successful e-commerce marketplace, it is necessary to seek an e-commerce development company that can be your technology partner for the long term. Online markets are often dynamic. They are subjected to change and develop progressively with new technology market trends. In such scenarios where you aim for continuous growth hiring a reliable e-commerce solutions provider is a go-to choice.