What are Small to Mid Sized Business Owners Wishing for this Holiday Season?
Whatever you wish for, my educated guess is it won’t be more work.
SMBs also are known to run lean operations – usually because our size and sales volume don’t allow for extra resources when it comes to space, staff, or money. We must be thrifty with our investments to make a profit.
Yet, many of us are digging ourselves into a big black hole when it comes to resourcing when we embark on the e-commerce journey.
Even in normal operating conditions, our e-commerce is often comprised of several different SAAS solutions, and plug-ins, not to mention the website itself. To keep these interconnected systems running, we need to invest in people to make the computers communicate and to generate the necessary content for our website and social media, the reports to track sales and fulfilment and much, much more.
Add in the stress of higher sales volumes, time-poor customers and staff who are stretched thin on the ground, and it is the perfect recipe for holiday stress.
Websites that can’t handle the extra traffic demand, systems that crash when too many orders come in, or updates where one system overrides the information on your customer sitting in another system.
When these things occur, the SMB is often only left with one solution – to manually bypass the systems and invest even more staff resources in ensuring every customer is well serviced. In other words, defeating the very purpose we put in e-commerce in the first place. We’re trying to scale, but the poorly networked multiple systems we must use, hold this scaling back.
As holiday demand rises, it puts pressure on these systems, and your staff, which all results in a poor experience for the customer, who is then less likely to be loyal and may leave you all together for another supplier who can meet their demands.
We’ve probably all read the statistics about how often websites fail, or how often customers abandon carts, but here are a few reminders to emphasize the importance of a new way of thinking about online retail.
60% of customers are unlikely to return to a site if they encounter an error.
2 out of 3 customers bounce if the site doesn’t load within six seconds.
Gartner reported in 2020 that a website crash can cost a business $5,600 per minute on average.
According to Conversific’s data, in 2022, the average shopping cart abandonment rate was 66.5%. This means that almost 7 out of 10 website visitors who put an item in their virtual shopping cart will leave without completing their purchase.
There is a game-changing trend occurring that will resolve many of these system integration and resourcing issues for the SMB.
That game changer is Customer Commerce.
Customer Commerce reimagines the idea of doing business online from the ground up. Integrating CRM, E-Commerce, and content management into one platform will allow SMBs to reduce their investment in humans who teach computers how to communicate to having those staff servicing customers instead. This puts software and tech back in the correct box of doing the mundane processing of data and information flows, whilst the humans look after other humans – namely the customer.
Since you will spend less time finding the right data for customers, they will be more satisfied and more loyal as they will have a great experience buying from your business. Your staff will also be happier and more satisfied, and therefore more likely to stick with you, meaning recruitment and training costs will be reduced.
All in all, a customer commerce-based approach to online commerce is a marked improvement over the existing patchwork solution afforded by e-commerce.
Returning to the topic of holidays and the increased traffic and time demands around these periods, you’ll be pleased to know that a single integrated system is not only less likely to fail than multiple stitched-together pieces of software, but Customer Commerce solutions are also able to handle surges in traffic and demand that happen around this time.
If you want happier and more loyal customers and happier more fulfilled staff, then your next step is to investigate how to become more customer-centric, by deploying a Customer Commerce solution.
Integrated systems like these used to be only accessible by huge corporations with budgets to match.
Now Customer Commerce is putting integration and a single system focus within reach of SMBs.
For more expert articles and industry updates, follow Martech News
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mikel Lindsaar, CEO and founder of StoreConnect
Mikel Lindsaar, CEO and founder of StoreConnect, is an experienced technology entrepreneur whose mission is to infuse small and medium-sized businesses with the power to implement a successful Customer Commerce strategy whilst scaling to meet growing demand.