The Annual Roadmap For Growing Your Ecommerce Store In 2021

Did you know that back in 2019 ecommerce sales worldwide were $3.5 trillion?

We don’t have the data for 2020 yet, but worldwide sales last year were projected to reach $4.2 trillion, though they have almost certainly exceeded that due to the pandemic.

And the ecommerce market is likely to continue growing in the foreseeable future, with the projected worldwide sales for 2022 being $6.54 trillion.

To ensure that your company continues to get a piece of the ever-expanding ecommerce pie, you must research, think strategically and plan your objectives annually by creating a roadmap.

In this post, we are going to discuss exactly how to create an ecommerce roadmap. It will display where your ecommerce store is going and the steps it will take to get there.

We will cover:

• Setting goals
• Creating a budget
• Building a team
• Managing that team
• Project planning
  
  

…and more.

Let’s dive in.

Analyze Your 2020 Performance

Okay, so before we start discussing the 2021 roadmap, it’s important to look back at the previous year. 

Seasonal Trends and Peak Periods From the Previous Year

Every ecommerce business is subject to seasonality.

Some are seasonal in nature, such as those that sell winter sports gear.

But the vast majority of them see spikes in sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and winter holidays.

You need to analyze the performance of the entire previous year if you want to properly prepare for 2021.

• Which month was the busiest?
• Which month was the least busy?
• Which products brought in the most sales during specific seasons?
  
  

Understanding this will help you create a more robust budget that won’t be thrown off by the seasonal ebb and flow of sales.

Moreover, once you know which periods resulted in the biggest increase in sales, you will be able to allocate your marketing spend more effectively. Tim Katz, Co-Founder of DYODE explains why this is important:

“Ensure that you have your merchandise, marketing communications, and project calendar planned out for the year; while this may seem like a trivial task it is a helpful habit to ensure cross-functional partners are aligned and in sync to support your growth. Look to refresh your remarketing efforts with relevant creative and messages and exclusive content and offers in order to ensure you are maximizing your most loyal audience.”

He continues:

“As online competition increases so does the cost of acquisition. Because of this, you should focus on nurturing your biggest fans with exclusive content, product, and communication. This is a new world that we live in and you should continue to evaluate your branding and product mix in order to stay relevant.”

Which of Your Channels Were Strongest/Weakest and Why?

Look at the campaigns you ran in the previous year and what marketing channels they utilized. 

You need to figure out which of these marketing channels are the right ones to get your store the most ROI. Marketing channels can range from search engine optimization, PPC, social media, referrals, email and more.

Ask yourself:

• Which marketing channels brought the most sales?
  
  

• Which marketing channels brought the least sales?
  
  

You may want to apply the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, which states that:

For many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.

The odds are that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your marketing channels while only 20% of your sales come from the remaining 80% of marketing channels.

Once you have identified the 20% of the marketing channels that generate 80% of your sales, consider allocating a significant amount of your marketing budget there.

Note: the exact ratio may be different, but a few marketing channels are likely producing disproportionate results. You want to double down on them.

Set Long Term and Short Term Goals for Your Ecommerce Store

Now that you have analyzed the previous year’s performance, it’s time to set goals for 2021.

Make Sure That Your Goals Are SMART

Arguably the most common mistake that people make when setting goals is being too vague.

That’s why it’s so important to set SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym that stands for:

• Specific. What exactly are you trying to achieve?
• Measurable. How will you measure whether you have achieved?
• Achievable. Is it realistic?
• Relevant. How does it fit into the big picture?
• Time-bound. By when do you intend to achieve it?

For example:

Instead of saying that you want to “make more money”, you can set a goal to “increase the annual profit by 25%”.

Why You Need Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Which metrics should you use to measure your progress towards your goals?

That’s where the Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs, come in. 

Here’s the KPI definition:

A KPI is a business metric that is directly relevant to a specific business goal.

For example:

Let’s say that your goal is to increase the annual profit by 25%. 

Obviously, the main KPI here is the annual profit, but what other metrics are relevant?

• Revenue
• Profit margin
• Number of sales
• Average order value
• Cost per customer acquisition
  
  

They are directly relevant to the goal because improving them would lead to an increase in annual profit.

You want to pick 3-5 KPIs to focus on.

Now let’s take a quick look at the important ecommerce metrics that you want to pay attention to in more detail:

Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who put items in their carts but do not finalize the purchase.

For example:

Let’s say that 100 people put an item in their carts.

Out of those 100 people, 88 of them left without buying.

That means that your cart abandonment rate is 88%.

And if that number seems crazy high to you, note that the average cart abandonment rate worldwide in March 2020 was 88.05%.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric that shows how much it costs you to acquire a new customer.

Its basic formula is this:

Marketing Expenses + Sales Expenses / The Number of New Customers Acquired = CAC

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that shows how much an average customer spends throughout their “lifetime” as a customer.

It’s a more complicated metric, but here’s the main equation:

Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Estimated Customer Lifespan = CLV

Average Order Value

Average Order Value (AOV) is a metric that shows the average value of a sale.

It’s a simple metric to calculate:

Revenue / The Number of Orders = Average Order Value

Note that all these metrics have a direct impact on the bottom line which is why it makes sense to consider using them as KPIs.

Create a Budget

Cash is the lifeblood of any business.

Once you run out of it, that’s it, you’re done.

That is why it’s so important to be financially responsible, manage cashflow well, and establish an emergency fund.

In psychology, there’s a phenomenon called the planning fallacy:

“The tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions.”

Basically, everything will probably take longer, cost more, involve more risk, and yield fewer benefits than you think.

It’s crucial to keep the planning fallacy in mind when creating the budget for the upcoming year for your ecommerce store.

Make sure to:

• Be realistic. Look at the historic cashflow data. What can you reasonably expect?
  
  

• Add slack. Once again, everything will likely cost more than you think, so don’t make your budget so tight that every cent is allocated before it is even earned. Leave some slack in your budget.
  
  

Your top priority should be the growth of your ecommerce store.

Build Your Team

Ecommerce growth requires constant human resources and infrastructure. 

This is why it’s crucial that you recognize there’s only so much that your current team can do to successfully scale your store. In fact, the chances are that in order to achieve your goals you may need to hire more employees throughout the year. 

Begin this process by accurately determining your staffing needs.

Who Should Hire And When Should You Hire?

Company leadership should be working on the business, and not in the business. However if you are currently without an HR department, you may need to dedicate some time to finding the right hires and training them.

That’s why it makes sense to start hiring as soon as you map out what departments need additional roles.

Hiring Full-Time Vs. Hiring a Freelancer

When it comes to expanding an ecommerce team, you have two options for most positions:

Full-time employees and freelancers.

Full-time employees can be expensive. It’s not only their salary that you need to think about. There’s also sick leave, vacation days, health insurance, etc. 

However, when you hire a full-time employee, you can expect them to give your business their undivided attention. Moreover, a full-time employee is likely to feel invested in the success of your company. Why? Simple. They don’t want to suddenly find themselves out of a job!

You only hire freelancers when you need them, you only pay for the work they do, you don’t need to provide any employee benefits. 

However, they are likely juggling a bunch of clients, projects, and deadlines, which means that they won’t be as focused on your business.

It’s up to you to decide what is more suited to your ecommerce store.

Where To Find Top Performers?

Hiring a full-time employee?

Then your best bet is probably DynamiteJobs job board, assuming that you are hiring for a location independent position.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for a freelancer, then UpWork is a good place to start.

‍

You may also want to post your job ad on skill-specific job boards.

Problogger job board is the most popular writing job board, so if you need written content, you can probably find a writer there.

Manage Your Team

Building a great team is not enough.

You also need to manage it well if you want your team members to do their best work.

Create a Job Description for Each Role

You want to have a specific job description for each role that explains exactly what that role entails.

That way you’ll avoid confusion, resentment, and shifting of responsibility (e.g. “I thought John was supposed to do that!”).

Assign Key Performance Indicators to Each Role

You should also assign KPIs to each role so that each team member would know what they should focus on. Dan LeBlanc, Founder of CEO Daasity explains:

“For the Merchants we worked with that saw triple-digit-growth in the past year they heavily invested in aligning their teams around the essential metrics to prioritize key initiatives. They ruthlessly tracked performance across their teams to make quick decisions on where to invest and where to reallocate budget.”

This also makes it easy to evaluate their performance. 

Create a Timeline and Set Milestones

You also need to manage each project correctly if you want it to be done on time and at the expected cost. 

Mapping out milestones and timelines in detail will do exactly that, by helping your team members know exactly what they need to do to get their tasks completed.

Step 1: Write a Project Scope Statement That Outlines the Deliverables

Every project should start with outlining the deliverables and what needs to be accomplished for it to be a success.

These deliverables should be specific. 

For example:

If you want to build a blog this year, then one of the deliverables could be to publish one article per week for the entire year (52 articles in total).

Note that this is a deliverable that the person who owns this project can control.

Articulate the steps it will take to achieve your objectives.

Step 2: Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

Once you have defined the deliverables for the project, you need to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). What’s that?

Here’s one definition:

“Deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables.

Here’s an example:

Step 3: Create a To-Do List for Each Work Package and Assign It to the Right Team Member or Department

Once you have created your Work Breakdown Structure, it’s time to assign each work package to the team member who will own it.

You also want to create a to-do list for each work package so that the person would know exactly what is expected of them. To-do lists are essentially checklists that list the actions one needs to take to perform a specific task. They reduce the number of mistakes team members make. 

Step 4: Determine Total Time for Each Task and Therefore for Each Deliverable

Now that everyone has their work packages and to-do lists, you should estimate the total time required to complete each task.

Once you have these estimates, use them to determine the time required for each deliverable. This will speed up the process because the person working on a task doesn’t need to waste cognitive energy thinking about how long they should set aside.

Just remember the previously mentioned planning fallacy. Everything will probably take longer than you thought it would. Make sure to account for that.

Organize Quarterly Reviews

It’s crucial to regularly evaluate your progress if you want your team to stay on track throughout the year. 

You can do that by organizing quarterly reviews where you:

• Evaluate the progress of each team member
• Evaluate the progress of the entire team
• Determine how you can help people to get back on schedule if they have fallen behind
• Evaluate each marketing campaign
• Evaluate analytics closely
• Decide on the next steps to take

Now let’s take a look at the marketing strategies of your roadmap.

Q1: SEO Planning and Content Creation

Want to get more organic traffic from Google?

Then you need to step up your SEO game. First, you must:

Conduct a website audit

You should start with auditing your ecommerce website. Site preformance is particularly important, as Ben Crudo, CEO of Diff agency explains:

“Don’t let your store slow down. Customer experience, sales, the Google ranking of your website, and mobile performance are all impacted by site performance. Making a habit of regularly auditing your site for speed, and taking steps to optimize it will ensure that your store keeps up with customer’s expectations for performance.”

Here’s what you want to know:

• Is your website mobile-friendly?
  
  

• Are there any outdated pages, broken links, etc. that need to be updated?
  
  

• Which content gets the most organic traffic?
  
  

• How is product organization?
  
  

• How are usability and speed?
  
  

• How is the customer experience?
  
  

You also want to critically evaluate your content. How can you make it better?

Choose keywords

Next, you want to identify keywords that you could rank for.

Here’s an overview of the keyword research process:

Find Keyword Ideas

You can use your knowledge of your niche to find keyword ideas. What are your potential customers interested in? Brainstorm these seed keywords.

You may also want to go where your customers hang out online and observe the conversations happening there. 

Finally, be sure to check out what your competitors are doing, especially what content ranks well on Google.

Create a Keyword List 

Once you have identified enough promising keywords, you should compile them into a keyword list.

Do Keyword Analysis

Once you have your keyword ideas, use a tool like Ahrefs to analyze the relevant keywords. 

Which ones seem promising? Look at metrics like keyword difficulty, search volume, clicks and traffic potential.

Note that you want to focus on keywords that you can realistically rank for.

Develop a content strategy

Now that you have a keyword list, it’s time to develop a content strategy.

Go through your keyword list and turn each of these keywords into an article topic.

Then create a content calendar so that you would know when each article should be published.

Content creation

Once you have a content calendar, it’s time to start writing.

You can write the articles yourself or you can hire a writer to do it for you. 

You may want to post a job ad on the previously mentioned ProBlogger job board if you choose the latter option.

Plan link building opportunities

It’s important to understand that creating great content is not enough. You also need other people to link to that content. Why?

Google uses backlinks as one of the top ranking factors to determine how valuable the page is to the visitors and where it should be placed in the search results pages for that keyword.

But not all links are made equal. The higher the domain authority of a website, the more valuable the link. 

You can use the Moz free Website Domain SEO Analysis Tool to see the domain authority of a specific website. 

Your aim should be to get as many backlinks as you can from authoritative websites so that your content will rank and in return, your ecommerce store will gain organic traffic.

Tackle the technical SEO basics

You also need to have your technical SEO on point if you want your content to rank on Google.

Here are a few basics of you need to optimize:

• Site structure
• Site speed
• Indexing issues
  
  

Q2: Focus on your website

Okay, so now you are on track to increasing your organic traffic, but how can you make the most of it? By optimizing your website.

That’s what you should focus on in the second quarter of the year.

Customer Journey Analysis

You want to start by analyzing the customer journey. 

Look at your data.

What steps do the customers take to get from that first interaction with your company to completing a purchase? 

You want to map this out so that you can then improve this process by finding the answer to questions like:

• Why did that customer not find what they searched for?
  
  

• Did this person not complete their order?
  
  

• What changes do I need to make to the layout of my ecommerce site to increase conversions?
  
  

Create a customer support powerhouse

There is often a lack of personal interaction between consumers and companies. This has led to a growth in customers feeling frustrated, since they often run into issues and can’t easily find a customer support agent to talk to. 

Even worse, some companies make their customers wait a long time for a response or don’t get back to them at all.

And since 95% of consumers say that customer service is important for brand loyalty, your ecommerce store needs to implement a fast and proactive customer support strategy that guides visitors through the customer journey.

The following tactics will delight your customers and keep them coming back for more.

Reduce your first response time

First response time (FRT) is the time elapsed between a customer submitting a query and how long it takes a customer service agent to get back to them. 

Today, customers expect a fast response. In fact, data shows that 88% of customers expect a response to their email within 60 minutes and 30% expect a response within 15 minutes or less.

Fortunately, a helpdesk like Gorgias now offers the ability to create macros. 

Macros are canned responses that agents can use for dealing with specific topics. This makes it much easier and faster to answer your customer’s queries. You can also add other pieces of information to your macro, such as Shopify data, like a customer’s order number. 

Reduce your resolution time

Resolution time is the average amount of time it takes your customer service agents to close a ticket after it has been opened. 

To reduce your resolution time, all of your customer’s tickets must be managed from one centralized hub in a multichannel helpdesk. This means your customer support team will have a full view of all your customer’s messages, no matter what channel they reach out from. 

Keep in mind that your customers reach out through various channels, (i.e. social, chat, email, phone).

The number of your one-touch closed tickets will also increase, which is important. After all, 33% of all consumers consider the most important aspect of good customer service experiences to be being able to get their problem solved in one single interaction. 

High customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

One way ecommerce stores measure their success is with the key performance indicator Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). It is a survey that determines a customer’s level of satisfaction at key interaction times, such as a support ticket exchange.

The types of questions you would ask in your survey would be variations of “How would you rate the support you received?”.

Then, respondents answer by using the following 1 to 5 scale:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied
   
   

I recommend that you present a CSAT survey after a ticket resolution, since this would be the perfect time to gather customer sentiment. 

Then, take onboard their feedback and see how you can make your other customers happier by improving your customer support strategy.

Analyze heat maps

Heatmaps can help you better understand customer behavior. Specifically how they are interacting with and behaving on websites. 

If you made any changes to the design of your ecommerce website, for example, a heat map can help you see if the changes made influence shoppers behavior. This can reduce both the bounce rate on both basket and product pages.

You can use software like HotJar to see the heatmap of your website.

Create landing pages

Landing pages are an essential component of any high-converting sales funnel.

They are a standalone web page, created specifically for marketing purposes. They are created based on a clear objective of getting the customer to take a specific action.

It’s likely that you can improve your conversion rate simply by introducing landing pages into your ecommerce website. Why? Because well-designed landing pages are personalized and highly-focused on visitor intent.

You can use software like Unbounce to create them.

A/B test landing pages

You never know what converts best until you test it.

That’s why it’s so important to continuously run A/B tests to see what works and what doesn’t. Testing various elements at a time on a web page, for example, help see which work well together in achieving the objective.

You can use software like VWO to set up the tests, run them, and analyze the results.

Personalized Product Recommendations 

To stay ahead and relevant in todays hypercompetitive marketplace, ecommerce companies must provide their shoppers with hyper-personailzed experiences. After all, research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.

This is why it’s important to ultizie a product recommendation engine that uses machine learning to decide what products should be displayed to each shopper on your website. Product recommendations also increase AOV, as studies have shown that the number multiplies by 369% when prospects engage with a single recommendation.

To make sure that your ecommerce store offers hyper-personalized recommendations based on the customer’s shopping history, we recommend you choose a top predictive, retail product recommendations system.

Omnichannel Experience 

Single-channel and multi-channel commerce was the norm for most of human history.

You want to buy something, you go to the seller, and you buy it directly from them.

But today a typical customer journey often involves multiple channels (social media, email, website, etc.). And the customer expects their varied interactions throughout their shopping journey—before, during, and after purchase, to be included every step of the way, even if they switch channels.

What’s important is that you provide a seamless, consistent experience throughout all of them.

Maintaining multiple channels well can be costly and the resources needed must be taken into account when deciding what independent channels you will engage your customers on.

Voice Commerce

With the growing popularity of voice recognition technology there comes an increasing demand for voice commerce functionality. Essentially, it provides your shoppers the ability to search for products on your website by voice.

For example:

A customer who has an Amazon Alexa device probably wants to be able to shop using voice recognition. Can they do that at your store?

This is still a relatively new trend, which means it’s an opportunity to be innovative and get ahead of your competition. You could build your own voice search feature on your website in your ecommerce site to offer a better user experience.

AR 

Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that allows the customer to visualize the product in the environment they intend to use it.

For example:

A customer who is considering buying an armchair may use AR to see how it would look in their living room.

Consider offering AR functionality if you are selling products that need to fit well into their environment (wall posters, various decorations, furniture, etc.).

Note that this is especially important for big-ticket items that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Q3: Social Media & Email Marketing

Are you taking full advantage of the business opportunities provided by social media and email marketing? If not, dedicating Q3 to ensure your brand to plays a bigger part and impact in what we see across all of these channels.

Social Commerce

When today’s shoppers see something they like when browsing social media, they want to have the option to buy it immediately, right there in that app. This is known as social commerce.

In fact, according to Statista as of April 2020, 37% of U.S. internet users between the ages of 18 to 34 years reported they had purchased something via social media before but did not do so regularly.

While social commerce is not the primary channel for most ecommerce businesses, it’s nonetheless an important one.

So don’t miss out on it. Let your customers shop on your social media pages.

Shoppable video ads

Did you know that YouTube lets you advertise your products with shoppable video ads?

These ads allow the viewer to browse inventory without leaving the world’s most popular video streaming platform. 

While shoppable video ads are still a new trend, marketers are quickly adopting this strategy.

In 2019, only 33% of marketers used them, but this number was projected to grow to 40% in the year 2020.

And it’s probably safe to say that it is only going to increase in 2021.

So don’t hesitate to implement shoppable video ads in your marketing strategy. 

Influencer Marketing

According to The State of Influencer Marketing 2020: Benchmark Report, the influencer marketing industry was projected to reach $9.7 billion in 2020.

There’s no denying that influencer marketing plays an increasingly important role in ecommerce.

You should network with influencers in your niche, build relationships with them, and work together with them to create powerful marketing campaigns.

It’s probably best to start with Instagram influencers since that’s the go-to platform for influencer marketing 

In fact, almost 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram as a part of their marketing mix.

Don’t have the budget required to work with Instagram superstars?

You can still benefit from partnerships with micro-influencers in your niche that have between 1,000 and 100,000 followers.

What matters is that those followers belong to your target audience.

Bringing customer experience into email marketing

You are probably already familiar with the concept of customer experience (CX):

Unfortunately, ecommerce businesses often neglect CX in their email marketing, which can put customers off.

It’s important to remember that email marketing isn’t just about getting the sale, it’s also about creating a connection and building a relationship between your brand and the customer.

There are three key pillars of CX marketing:

1. Helpfulness
2. Customer-Centricity
3. Personalization & Segmentation
   
   

So make sure that your emails focus on the customer, add value, and provide information that is relevant to them. 

Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about them. Jon from Omnisend explains:

“Ninety-percent of today’s shoppers expect a personalized experience. Once ecommerce businesses focus their communication to reflect customer behavior and send relevant messages at just the right times, their engagement statistics and marketing revenues rise rapidly. 

The key to effective personalization lies in effectively segmenting your customers. Rather than sending out the same, generic messages to all of them at once, it is much more effective to segment them.”

The plain text email

Plain text emails that are more personal tend to have a 17% higher click through rate than HTML and overly salesy emails. 

When writing plain text emails, it’s important to remember that you are essential speaking to a person one-on-one. Don’t fall into marketing speak just because they are a subscriber on your list.

It’s also important to A/B test your marketing emails to see whether your messages convert better as plain-text emails or as HTML emails.

Q4: Setup your BFCM campaigns

Black Friday and Cyber Monday offer an incredible growth opportunity for your ecommerce store. But are you prepared to take advantage of the holiday season?

Prepare your holiday season strategy

You can’t just expect the sales to come flooding.

You need to prepare for the holiday season in advance:

• Create separate marketing campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and winter holidays

• Give the customers an incentive to buy from you by offering them amazing deals
  
  

• Make sure that you have enough inventory to handle the surge in demand. You don’t want to run out of stock!
  
  

All this will help you make the most out of the holiday buying frenzy.

International Ecommerce

International ecommerce allows you to expand your target audience, reach new customers, and make more money. And in 2021 there is no better time to take this opportunity. In the words of Easyship co-founder, Tommaso Tabournattie: 

“We believe any business, regardless of size, should be able to sell globally.”

Bryan from Easyship explains:

“The ecommerce ecosystem grew by an order of magnitude in 2021. Global shipping surged, especially between US-based and European countries like Italy, France, Spain and the UK. Shipments to EU countries accelerated by a staggering 1800%, while Brazil, Russia and Israel also saw substantial upticks in cross-border shipping. Meanwhile, US merchants dramatically expanded their share of foreign markets, and we expect this trend to continue well beyond 2021.

From day one, Biaggi, a travel brand knew how important it would be to expand internationally. The issue? International shipping and fulfilment is a complex and time-consuming process. Biaggi needed a quick-fix solution that would keep costs low while freeing them to focus on growth. By using Easyship, Biaggi gained access to pre-negotiated courier rates, full fee visibility, duty and tax automation, and more. The fledgling brand enjoyed a revenue boost of 20% plus saved $100,000+ on shipping in just one year.”

If you want to take your business global, you need to be strategic about it:

• Don’t make your products available everywhere at once. Go region by region instead. Only move to the next area once you can comfortably handle the previous one
  
  

• Research each region before entering that market. It’s important to understand the culture, learn about the customs, familiarize yourself with popular payment platforms, etc. Do your homework!
  
  

• Get legal advice. Each country has its own laws regarding ecommerce. It makes sense to consult a lawyer before entering a specific market. You don’t want to get in trouble with the law!
  
  

You may be super excited about going global, but it’s important to temper your enthusiasm. Think things through, take it slow, do it right. 

Otherwise, expanding too fast may destabilize your business.

Quick Order Fulfillment and Delivery

Online shoppers value speed.

However, only 17% of consumers say that they are always satisfied with online retailer’s shipping options for speed of delivery, compared to the 30% who are happy with Amazon’s delivery speed. 

You may want to consider using a third-party logistics (3PL) service that will store your inventory, assemble the orders, and ship them to the customer.

That way, you may be able to give your customers what they want, which is 1-2 day shipping.

Rental & Recommerce

Today’s consumers are more and more interested in recommerce. What’s that?

It’s simply a term for selling second-hand products online. That includes everything from books to clothes to smartphones. 

You may want to think about how you can incorporate second-hand products into your ecommerce business.

It’s also worth considering offering rental products. 

A customer that needs a product for one specific occasion might be hesitant to buy it. Or worse, they might buy it, use it, then return it. 

You can address this by providing the option to rent that product instead.

Wrapping Up

Want to grow your ecommerce business in 2021?

Then you need to:

• Learn from the previous year
• Set SMART goals
• Create a budget and stick to it
• Build a great team and manage it well
• Have a concrete plan for the whole year
  
  

You also need to continuously invest in your customer support by hiring great people, giving them proper training, and providing them with the best tools. This is especially crucial during the definite spike in demand for customer service during the holiday season. Provide your online shoppers with the top-quality support they expect.

Sounds like a lot of work? Well, it is, there’s no denying that. 

But that’s what it takes to build a sustainable business and create a better future for ecommerce store.

So don’t hesitate. Put this roadmap into action.

Special thanks to our friends at Gorgias for their insights on this topic.