2020: The year of the ecommerce hustle. Whether started in desperation or fulfilling destiny, you now have a burgeoning business, a sniff of success, and you’ve got some decisions to make!

The first few would be the usual course corrections:

  • Is your current direction approximately where you wanted it to be heading? If not, what’s the next thing to adjust?
  • Are you clear on who your market is, and whether you’re hitting your target market? If this isn’t where you want it, Is this a marketing challenge or a product/price problem?
  • Are you managing to grow repeat business, and do you need to adapt your product mix to encourage return customers? Could you be selling accessories, spares, associated products or maintaining a product through the lifecycle?
  • Are the margins healthy – sufficient, not extravagant? Are you doing too much yourself and missing the actual costs, or perhaps too reliant on multiple third parties who’re all taking a small piece?

 

While answering these, the other considerations are around partnerships and those who’re going to be integral in growing alongside you:

  • One naturally needs outlets. Whether a website or Instagram, home grown or hosted, there are plenty of options, but importantly one needs to plan and prepare around the integrations one will need later. These could include payment gateways, location services, customer support tools, survey engines, ERP, WMS etc. – the goal will be as little recapture as possible. These optimisations are worth anticipating early to make sure they’re not sidetracked in the future.
  • Payment gateways, marketing schemes, bulk warehousing solutions, outsourced fulfilment… these all have their place, and are mostly essential. They also all have their costs, and it’s operationally critical to keep these in line with your business growth. Keeping the differentiating parts of your business inhouse will provide massive depth of understanding and save you from being trapped inside someone else’s time constraints.
  • Unless selling digital goods, you’ll need couriers and logistics to conclude your sales. Your delivery partner is the last voice, final impression, and ultimately the closed loop to your customers. If you were serving food, you’d want your waiting staff to look and act the part, and it’s sometimes worth being choosy about this final customer touch point.

 

Aramex understands the requirements for high touch service and has been servicing standout South African ecommerce clients for years. We prioritise delivering insight, strategic partnership, and the appropriate bouquet of ecommerce services to suit your actual needs. With multiple service types, national collection points, international, express and freight capabilities, we can improve your existing ecommerce capabilities.

 

Talk to us, let us align with your ambitions, and you’ll understand why our customers are growing from strength to strength.