eCommerce is trending. It’s hot despite winter days. Christmas and New year holidays is the perfect time for planning a strategy for your future eCommerce startup. You’re excited, full of power and will to finally launch and start growing an online store in 2019. But are you sure you’ve considered everything? What about the team? If you’re not positive about following this road alone, the following are some ideas of who might be a good fit for your startup or growth team.
Founder – you
It all starts with one person – you. In the very beginning of a startup, you and your skills will be the only source you have. What you can, what you have time for, what you can sacrifice for success – these are the questions for you to answer before starting an online store. That will be you who will do research to find the products, the eCommerce platform, sales channels, suppliers, who will do count margins, estimate revenue and taxes. Searching for the targeted audience will also be your task, writing a growth strategy – you again. Take a peak of the roadmap for an eCommerce entrepreneur to follow before launching a startup.
Most of those duties will be then delegated to other personnel when you take off and will be able to hire. But some will stay with you. Strategy, suppliers, shipping partners, and sales channels will keep delivering you sleepless nights for a long period.
Developer or architect
This is the maker who takes ideas and thoughtы into motion. This team member will unleash the power of all instruments that you’ve previously researched and chosen on the early stage. The developer will add functionality that is not in place or does not work according to your expectations. This person will assure the execution of the growth strategy at the back-end. Plus, the developer will enrich it with the in-depth insights about the timeframe or will save time and money for your project by offering an easier or better solution to complete the task. Find out how you can find a proper developer for your eCommerce business.
Marketing and design
This person will be pulling your sails and speed up the run of your store. Marketing will involve lots of staff on the launch stage so it will be hard to find a person capable to cope with the wide range of instruments and duties all at once. The perfect marketer will have to deal with the following channels simultaneously:
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Search engine marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Display advertising
- Affiliate marketing
Probably it will be wise to concentrate on the most effective channels with fast results and move on to the others when you get the first profit. PPC, emails, and influencers will get you the fastest result and money.
All marketing activities will require promotional materials like images, banners, icons, graphics, etc. The Internet has lots of tools that can help to create some of them on your own, but if you don’t have skill or knowledge about color schemes, UI/UX, and web design best practices, the result may be poor and distract or even scare the visitors. The unprofessional looking store won’t build customers trust. Having a freelance designer in your team will be wise. Delegate creating the most important visual element to the pro since these expenses will return in credibility and positive impression of your customers.
Finance or accounting
The goal of the eCommerce accountant is to properly record all income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and equity transactions for your online store under the guidance of the regulating authorities. Plus, don’t forget that being a business, even online, you have to pay taxes.
Financial consultant or accountant will help you to figure out when you should be investing in more inventory, paying yourself more, increasing marketing budget, or setting money aside for future needs. It can also be a service, not a person. This way it’s more affordable and will cover all your needs on the early stage of your startup.
Customer service
All online retailers should invest in eCommerce customer service. Providing a great customer experience is one of the few ways to genuinely standout in an already saturated online retail marketplace. Customers who don’t get the service they’d prefer can simply move onto to another store; it’s literally a click away.
To hear the voice of your customers, keep your customer care manager as close to you as possible. This person will be the face and the voice of your business and you want to know what this voice is saying. Customers will take their chance to send you messages or call to tell about their problems related to storefront errors, shipping, returns, stock availability, discounts, etc. Your CCM will be under high pressure so make sure to stay close to provide assistance, quick solutions and approve loyalty extras, discounts, etc.
Don’t hide your contacts, put them on the most visible place of your storefront only if you have a good customer care manager. Get ready to spend good money to hire a pro. Saving on customer care is not a good idea, because the customers may start saving on you in return, and you will lose them forever.
Let’s build your beautiful store
Doing business online is no different from running a brick-and-mortar storefront; it requires just as much work and dedication to see it off the ground. But the right team of like-minded people can make real magic and rocket the store to the stars. We’ll be happy to join your project as developers and assure the quality of code and functionality of the platform.
