Somesh Dwivedi

Make your decision making process nimble. Most decisions in E-Commerce are experimental in nature and can be optimised or paused as data from the experiment feeds through. Enabling your team to execute the experiment rapidly, failing fast, and learning from the instance can lead to rapid speeds of initiatives, resulting in greater productivity, and one or two supersized successes offsetting the numerous unsuccessful experiments.

Effectively there are two options. 1) Build - Building on top of your current system architecture to enable integration with E-Commerce platforms and 2) Buy - Buying off-the-shelf third-party API solutions that can bridge the organisation’s system architecture with E-Commerce SaaS solution of choice. Unless system architecture is a competitive advantage of the organisation, buying an external solution to quickly plug into E-Commerce systems is usually quicker.

Lack of reviews is as much of a problem as unfavourable reviews. Invest in review generating programs, for instance Vine on Amazon, that makes samples available to a pre-authorised group of reviewers by Amazon to consume the product and leave a review. This will start to build some momentum for your product in the online marketplace, resulting in a boost to Conversion.

Seemingly small changes like making the Checkout button more prominent, and richer product detail page content to explain price premium of your product compared with cheaper alternatives, can have a sharp effect on Conversion rates. A good E-Commerce SaaS/CMS should enable clear analysis of customer experience prior to and after the introduction of these changes. One should also be careful to reduce other variables (like promotions) during the test period to be able to attribute any movement in Conversion rates to the changes made with the help of CMS.

Whilst acknowledging the challenges in rapidly changing business logistics of a large organisation to make it fit-for-purpose for E-Commerce, key pointers like Purchase Order confirmation rate, Order fill rate, Vendor Lead Time, Out of stock %, Barcode information compliance etc. should be monitored to ensure progress towards stronger fulfilment on E-Commerce.

A useful way to identify products that might be hits in holiday season is to use first-party consumer behaviour data platforms provided by Marketplaces like Amazon. On Amazon vendor central, you can quickly check the search volume rank of consumer queries in real-time. For instance, the highest searched keyword on Amazon UK last week was ‘Mother’s Day gifts’. You can then look through your assortment to see if any products might make for good gifts at this occasion and promote them or change the content to be more Mother’s Day relevant in this example. This will help capture demand more accurately for these products .