April 3, 2015 Jordhy Ledesma

eCommerce Requirements: 7 Tips to Become an eCommerce Market Leader

keeping the focus

In order to establish an eCommerce presence you need a powerful storefront solution, sophisticated product search facilities (preferably a separate solution), merchant accounts and a secure connection to dependable payment gateways. However, in order to become an eCommerce leader you need so much more. This article gives some tips to help you achieve eCommerce excellence.

1. The first step is a having a dynamic organization where all departments contribute to a specific digital competitive advantage. A department (or person if you’re still small) that deals with in-depth keyword analysis and traffic acquisition, a technical team of full stack developers that manage an error-free,  modern-looking, fast-loading portal, and product managers that know how to scale a product. Hence, quite paradoxically, people make or break a digital business. First and foremost you need people that know the latest game in town or can learn it pretty quickly. I look for smarts, curiosity and discipline. I also want top performers, say the top 5% or 1% of their fields. Trust me, it pays to hire the best people. Don’t skim on this.

2.  Set up performance dashboards that intimidate even the most analytical people. Install Piwik and own your statistics, set up accounts at New Relic and similar services and develop a set of 360-degrees digital dashboards to cast light into the performance of the whole operation.

3. Make your organization a data-driven one by tying procedures to KPIs given by the digital dashboards. Be very diligent and very strict with your KPIs don’t let them slip away. If necessary, adjust processes or procedures to maintain high performance.

4.  Analyze the stack of similar companies. To get ideas about new software and techniques. This can pay a lot of dividends, because using similar software gives your team the support of a pre-existing community. I can’t stress the importance of this. It’s truly major.

5. Get real about fraud management. Install a fraud management system and start collecting predictive metrics. This is one of your most important key performance indicators. The key to fraud management is reduction of credit card purchases by accepting cash, debit and bitcoin while setting thresholds in credit card purchases with certain attributes. Monitor the geography, nature, time and origin of the purchase. For example, visitors that arrived to your site via search engines are very unlikely to turn to fraud. These are usually true customers that found you using “buying intent” keywords.

6. Develop a taste for in-house solutions. Partnering is great, packaged software is great and ASPs are great. However, when its time to scale, your better off developing your own software. But only develop your key digital assets, don’t develop an ERP or reporting solution, leave that to Oracle or RJ Metrics.

7. ABC = Always be coding. New code, optimization, new servers, new tools and new discounts! Always be coding means that every week something gets better in your organization. This creates a sense of progress, lifts up the community and gives the competition something to think about.


(Visited 67 times, 1 visits today)