Tag Archive for: 247TopSeller

The 3 Ways to Increase Your Online Business Part 1: Efficiency

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time-warp-spiral-clock-face

As far as I see it there are are three core ways to increase your online business, this is pretty much universal across all the marketplaces and yes, I am blatantly ignoring some of the “traditional methods” in this article.

The first of these three ‘ways’ is “efficiency” and I’m looking forward to detailing the following two in the next few days or so, but for now, lets get right into ‘efficiency’.

Efficiency

Efficiency in general describes the extent to which time or effort is well used for the intended task or purpose. It is often used with the specific purpose of relaying the capability of a specific application of effort to produce a specific outcome effectively with a minimum amount or quantity of waste, expense, or unnecessary effort. “Efficiency” has widely varying meanings in different disciplines. Wikipedia

This article has two spurs, the first is internal efficiency and the second is external efficiency. They are quite different and I’m looking forward to showing how they differ and what they mean for you.

Internal efficiency

What I mean by this is making the processes you use each day more efficient. This could be the implementation of software products like eSellerPro, ChannelAdvisor, Linnworks, 247TopSeller etc… What you’ll not be openly told, is that such tools add processes and normally the gains made by using such software stem from a single source, which is…

Efficient Processes!

None of these tools (yes they are tools, they are not the be-all & end-all) are not quick to learn, however if you’re migrating from one to another, then they are generally all very similar, they just have different interfaces, features and dare I say it quirks too. But the underlying factor in them all, regardless of design, is that they enforce processes onto the business and typically they are a lot more efficient than the processes the business was using before.

This might be inventory creation, unifying the data that is created, so that it can be ported across many sales channels, courier rules to match orders to the most cost/time efficient service or just simple order processing of orders from multiple channels in a single place.

The list goes on, however ultimately, these tools are designed to automate the labour intensive tasks and this is where the one of the largest gains can be made by a company, because after the initial learning curve** (see note), strict (ish) processes are in place and the bi-product of efficiency here is time gained, which typically goes into three places:

  1. Sourcing & creation of more stock
  2. Greater focus “on” the business
  3. More leisure time (lol, I had to add this one, I’ve only seen one do this thoroughly and I envy them greatly)

** This varies greatly from not only one software product to another, but to person-to-person also. Noting that some people just fail at this stage, its typically tied to either the person not being capable (through lack of applicable skills) or through their unwillingness to let-go of certain tasks.

Outside of “software products” that add obvious efficiency gains, focusing on the processes that are used to do the following, all allow extra efficiency to the business

  1. Sourcing stock & supplier relationships
  2. Managing accounting
  3. Managing staff (internal and external)
  4. Create new, better products (and/or inventory data, if not a manufacturer)
  5. And so on…

Internal Efficiency Summary

Internal efficiency is everything that happens inside the business, this could be the use of software “tools”, that typically give the biggest gains or becoming more efficient with accounting, so that the funds that are in the company move quicker (or slower) or even developing better relationships with your suppliers to then leverage a greater buying power outside of pure monetary forms.

External Efficiency

To define what I mean here by “External Efficiency”, this is everything that happens on sale producing platforms and not internally related (such as accounting or sales order processes). I know these are directly linked, but if you simply think of the internal efficiency as everything you do in your offices and the external efficiency as everything your customer sees.

As the majority of readers here are focused on three areas eBay, Amazon and Website commerce, I’ll keep to these three areas.

eBay.com LogoeBay Efficiency

Starting with eBay, I am implying that gains can be made through more efficient listing practices & styles. This could mean using more item specifics data, reworking your listing titles, especially if you consider that the titles on eBay are going from 55 chars to 80 chars soon, why not rework your current titles now, but also rework them so that you add-in the extra characters later, when the longer listing titles have been launched.

Note: I’m thinking reworking listing titles now using market research, but also keeping track of the current title in excel, the new title (to be changed now) and a longer title that is ~80 chars long, all with the custom title, so that they can be updated through the said third party software, or if you are not using these, then something like eBay File Exchange to update them en-mass later.

Adding of cross-selling modules to listings, better product images, reworking item descriptions that you know are poor or have caused numerous questions and so on…

I could (but I’m not going to) go on a bender here with regards to eBay, however, let me pose you this question and leave you to make your own decisions:

If you were starting from scratch and could change anything you wanted about your current eBay set-up, what would you change?

Now change them.

Amazon Efficiency

Focusing on the external side to Amazon, when was the last time that you looked to see if there were any duplicates of your products on Amazon and listed against those as well?

While Amazon is supposed to have a single record for a single product, with so many merchants creating inventory on Amazon, you’re bound to find duplicates across your product range and you could leverage these to gain extra sales and sometimes for more money too as there are less competitors with these records.

This is just one area of many that can be employed with Amazon, the other two note-worthy tasks in relation to Amazon is to increase your exposure across the other Amazon sites, as Amazon have recently enabled UK accounts to sell across Europe and the second is FBA.

Have you looked at Fulfilment By Amazon yet?

If not, do so now here http://services.amazon.co.uk/services/fulfilment-by-amazon/features-benefits/ oh and this tool is well hidden, I only found it a few days back, here is Amazon’s FBA calculator! https://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/fbacalc/fba-calculator.html

Website Efficiency

Perhaps the biggest opportunity, yet the biggest challenge for online businesses. With eBay & Amazon, the marketing fees (yes eBay and Amazon fees are MARKETING FEES, not a fee for being party of a community and drooling over feedback counts), its hard for merchants to comprehend that they need to spent more on the promotion of their website than they do with either of these channels.

Its a common complaint, that they[merchants] do really well with regards to the other two channels but fail completely when it comes to their website channels. If you’re focusing 99.9% of your time & resources on eBay & Amazon, its no wonder that they account for 99.9% of your sales. What would happen if you flipped this on its head, do you think you’d make a pretty hefty dent in the 99.9%?

I’m over a thousand words at this point, so if you’ve got this far you’re doing great. This topic deserves hundreds of thousands, but I’m going to cut it short to stay on topic and detail a few ideas you could focus upon to make your website more “efficient”.

  1. Look at page load times
  2. Improve categorisation
  3. Add better category descriptions
  4. Create backlinks in forums
  5. Create a email marketing campaign
  6. Create a blog
  7. Do some article marketing
  8. Add tracking counters (or set events/funnels) for critical pages, such as home, category, item detail, add to cart events, cart, checkout stages and the cart final page. So you can measure them and then make changes to improve them and have quantifiable data to measure the impact.
  9. Try some simple A/B testing using www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
  10. Set up a Google Adwords campaign, if you already have done so when was the last time you looked at the ad groups or where you were gaining links from, could you create some targeted backlinks on the content sites that are delivering click through’s?

Efficiency Summary

While both mutually dependent & a little tricky to get-ones-head-around to begin with, internal efficiency is everything that happens in the background and external efficiency is everything that the customer sees. In both cases there will need to be efforts made to improve efficiency, some will be simple and quick to do, while others are much longer term.

Reading

I’m inclined to include two books for some light reading here (both aff links) and the full list of my reading materials can be found in my library:

  1. 4 Hour Work Week
    The first is the 4 Hour Work week by Timothy Ferris whom takes the concept of efficiency and smashes it to pieces (also introduces you to a concept of dreamlining, but that is quite a shocker and you need to read the book to at least comprehend this, its why I sat in the sun all day yesterday with the kids & friends enjoying a picnic)
  2. e-Myth Revisited
    The second is another personal favourite, E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. Sarah and ‘All About Pies’, I can vividly imagine the manager of the hotel taking the file off his shelf and showing him the processes, the walk from the reception to the restaurant & the orchard.The last chapter is rubbish compared to the rest of the book, but if you need (and I’m guessing you do, because I did) a easy step into the franchise model, even if you have no intention to ever franchise your business, this is a fantastic starting point. Oh and when you’ve read the book, I have the managers hat on currently, whom is whipping my technician in to writing this article.

This concludes this section of a three part article on “The 3 Ways to Increase Your Online Business”. The next two… I’ll release in the next few days, but for now, did you find this useful?

Are There Alternatives to eSellerPro?

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I’ve been asked this question too many times to ignore it. As you would expect there is some general unrest amongst users of nearly all the systems I’ve come across, not just eSellerPro. And the larger the business using eSellerPro, because they take a percentage-of-sale, the more expensive it becomes and monthly bills of +£7,000 are not unheard of.

This article was originally published in March 2011 and it’s sorely been due an update for quite some time. This is the updated version for the end of 2013.

I’m looking forward to clearing up a few areas in the following sections and also aiming enlighten you to what the “2 year cycle” is that causes account churn. Also this should save me typing/having long conversations and have a resource to help anyone else that asks :)

Disclaimer

I feel it is important that I state, clearly and openly the following facts regarding myself and my interactions with eSellerPro. Read the full version in The Unofficial History of eSellerPro (that has changed too as they have one CEO leave [see here] and another non-marketplace oriented CEO arrive [see here] in late 2013).

  1. I am a Former Employee of eSellerPro
    I used to work there for almost three years. I am not a shareholder
  2. I work with businesses that use eSellerPro
  3. I’m not a Sales Rep
    I do not get any “kick-backs” for writing about eSellerPro (maybe a mistake on their part as this is the updated version for 2013?)

The Underlying Questions

This might not be pretty reading for you but I feel its absolutely required to state these questions, because that’s what is really being asked. These questions can be boiled down to four main areas, these are:

  1. I’ve been using eSellerPro for X months, its great, but I am not feeling the ‘all singing all dancing’ I was sold
  2. I’m annoyed with little support and no development time I used to get and feel trapped
  3. I am an eCommerce manager, I need to weigh up if my decision to use eSellerPro was the right one or not
  4. I feel like a change, what do you suggest Matt?

These are all ugly questions and I’m sure there are others too, let’s dive, answer these and if you have any other questions the forums are here.

The Four Nasty Questions Answered

Below I do my best to answer these four underlying questions for you:

Q1: I’ve been using eSellerPro for X months, its great, but I am not feeling the ‘all singing all dancing’ I was sold

What you must remember is that you are buying access to what is an extremely complex system, that gives you lots of processes to make your business operation more efficient. Sometimes in its complexity is its beauty, but other times it can cause confusion and utter frustration. I whole heartedly feel for you.

It does not matter if we’re talking eSellerPro, ChannelAdvisor or any other platform here, the same applies. You are using a tool to make your operation more efficient, they all just differ in the depths of ability and each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Now for the smarter business owners they relieve themselves of the day-to-day tasks and move up so that they can deal with the important business things. This is called leverage, they use a tool to automate as much as possible and then go about setting themselves to work ON their business not IN their business, eSellerPro is just one of many tools that are available to aid this.

Q2: I’m annoyed with little support and no development time I used to get and feel trapped

Bluntly put, this is to be expected. eSellerPro has had multiple rounds of VC funding and things are going to be different.

The VC company is there to make money and of course there is bound to be a disparity between what the original ideology for what the tool should have become and what the VC company needs to do to make their money back (and a lot more, because remember they invested to make money, not in ideology or a utopia to make the the tool as best as it can be).

Think of it as a mother weaning her offspring, it hurts but everyone grows up. If you were expecting the same kind of attention you got in the early days, sorry those days are on their way out, if not gone by now. You’re probably feeling trapped for a good reason, the product is deep & wide, if you’ve got all the different business operations running through eSellerPro, such as accounting, inventory control, order management, couriers, supplier management and anything else this beast does. I’d feel trapped too.

eSellerPro is a monster system that was designed to cover every aspect of a multichannel business and now in hindsight an approach that I have openly admitted to being the wrong approach [see here].

Q3: I am an eCommerce manager, I need to weigh up if my decision to use eSellerPro was the right one or not

This one is tricky because it needs a good understanding of where you came from, what you are doing now and where you’re going.

However a generalisation is that if you business can cope with the barrier to entry for the eSellerPro product (Fees, training time, staff costs, need for systems etc…) then you’ve probably made the right choice until the monthly fees start to really become expensive.

Q4: I feel like a change, what do you suggest Matt?

I don’t bull-shit and know my stuff backwards (which is to be expected from someone who ran their own business for 3 years & has worked with two software providers over the past 10 years). So please don’t take this personally when I suggest the following:

It’s my opinion that instead of changing providers, you try and change first.

Regardless of the current provider you’re using, I’m suggesting that you try and change first. This is because the real cost of moving providers can be huge.

Lets say you have a team of 10, how many hours do you think it will take as a team to change providers? Now triple it.  Us human’s are the worst estimators, if I say something is going to take an hour, that normally means three.

Because these software platforms are so deep, the cost of moving from one to the other can be immense. It would be fair better to attempt to take a fresh look at your situation, speak to a mentor or someone outside your business who you trust and see if there is a way you can work with the system rather than against it. Take a holiday, do something before you commit to changing your software, especially with something like eSellerPro because it is so deeply tied to your business..

The 2 year Churn

This is a natural process and it goes on all the time regardless of what arena you are in, its why you hear unconfirmed rumours that ChannelAdvisor sell 200 accounts each month, but equally loose 200 accounts per month globally. People frankly get bored and after a while get itchy and start looking at what looks like “greener grass”.

This is a human trait, the grass always looks greener on the other side, we get bored. I’ve known businesses jump from one platform to the next yearly and of one specifically that has used all the major ones at least once! I’m just pointing out, that if you are thinking this question, that you maybe wondering what the grass is like over the hedge and sadly the real answer, that few can honestly tell you, is that its probably just the same, just a different interface.

The Alternatives

I’ve answered some of the underlying questions you might be asking yourself right now, I’ve also hopefully done as much as I can in a single article to point out the following:

  1. Being uncertain is a good thing, its only natural.
  2. The grass might be greener somewhere else.
  3. Think through moving providers extremely seriously and weigh up the true costs of moving providers.

Now onto the alternatives.

The critical piece of information that no sales representative of any company is going to tell you is that “this system you are looking at its not the perfect system for your current business“. Something has to give, namely you.

Thankfully there are several alternatives available across the globe, they all vary in depth of functionality & costs. The next comparable 2nd Generation software to eSellerPro is ChannelAdvisor.

ChannelAdvisor has the same kind of pricing structure as eSellerPro, a minimum amount to be paid, say £600 a month and a percentage of sale from 1 to 2%. If this percentage of your gross sales goes over the 1-2% amount, then you pay this instead. This is why with both of these companies can be insanely expensive for larger businesses with businesses paying them thousands of pounds every month (which might be one of the reasons why you’re reading this article right now, it’s getting silly you’re paying more but getting exactly the same level of service).

Yes there are others, ChannelGrabber, StoreFeeder, SellerExpress there are lots and lots of 2nd generation software providers. Sadly I’m getting bored with the offers of “come see XYZ” and they’re receiving back messages saying, “In less than 100 words, explain why your system is not the same as everyone else’s” for which I rarely get a reply or if I do it has something to do with price and not functionality or an entirely different way of working (that would be a 3rd Generation of multi channel software).

All 2nd Generation multi-channel software works in a similar method, either a flat-fee per month or a percentage of sale. The level of expertise in each software product varies and so does the functionality too.

An Obvious Alternative?

esellerpro-logo-200eSellerPro.

Yup that’s right, you may of picked up the hint from earlier that this was coming. The alternative that you have not been thinking is staying put and changing yourself to match the situation you are in. This goes for any provider, not just eSellerPro.

Think back to why you wanted to use eSellerPro in the first place, write down the reasons and now go back and achieve them. If you can whole heartedly say you’ve tried every option, then maybe its time you weigh-up the alternatives.

In Conclusion

I’ve answered the four underlying questions that are being asked. I know full well that saying certain things straight is not always the best way, however sometimes these things needs to be said and if you’re reading this, its too late :)

I sincerely hope that I have given you an insight into possibly what you are really asking when you say “Are there any alternatives to eSellerPro” and that there are options and an option you might not have been considering, changing yourself.

Matt

PS. If you’re sick-to-death of 2nd generation providers, say hello to the 3rd generation UnderstandingE.com/NOW