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Building an e-commerce business can be an incredibly rewarding endeavor for entrepreneurs, but it can also be challenging to keep track of everything.
You have to oversee a wide range of responsibilities, from maintaining your site and its product listings to inventory control, order fulfillment, customer service, and marketing, all while trying to make smart financial decisions for your business. And like most start-ups, you’re probably doing all this with limited resources and, more to the point, limited time.
Research indicates that the average entrepreneur spends around 36% of their time on basic admin tasks like data entry, and that plays a part in why new businesses often struggle to meet their growth objectives. It’s incredibly draining, if not completely unsustainable, trying to grow a business when so much time is occupied by menial work. This is why streamlining with tech is so important: it helps take some of the load off so you can keep things moving and focus on growth.
In this piece, we’ll explore some practical, cost-effective solutions that you can use to streamline operations and elevate your business’s performance.
Plugins to Empower Your Business
First things first, let’s start with plugins for your site. These solutions are typically quite lightweight and quick to implement, but they can have a profound effect on your day-to-day business. The following are three types of plugins that can help you streamline operations, support business growth, and elevate your day-to-day performance right away:
eCommerce plugins
It should come as no surprise that eCommerce plugins are at the top of this list. When you operate a business that sells products online, order processing is one of the biggest potential bottlenecks you’ll face, so it should be the first thing you look to streamline. eCommerce plugins can help by enabling you to simplify the whole sales process. With these tools, you can set up secure, frictionless checkouts for customers and track sales to streamline inventory. By automating the majority of sales-related workflows, you’ll have more time to focus on more strategic tasks.
Form builders and contact plugins
Communication with customers is essential for growing a small business, especially in eCommerce, where you can’t build rapport through face-to-face interactions. However, managing customer inquiries and feedback can quickly become time-consuming and challenging. A form builder and contact plugins can help alleviate this issue. These tools allow you to quickly create customizable contact pages, forms, and surveys for your site while automating data collection. This will enable you to manage and respond to customer feedback easily, avoiding the tedious task of sifting through your inbox.
Social media feed plugins
To achieve real growth with your eCommerce business, you need to have a consistently strong digital presence on major social media channels, but managing multiple accounts and then updating your site content separately represents a bad return on time investment. Social media plugins eliminate this issue by syncing the two. This means that your social posts will be pulled directly from their platforms and posted directly to your site, ensuring that it remains dynamic and populated with fresh content while saving you valuable time.
Apps to Complement Your Plugins
In conjunction with plugins that enhance the functionality of your website, you can also implement applications that will help your operational management. Here are some game-changing apps to consider:
Scheduling apps
When running an eCommerce business, there is a distinct advantage in building a geographically dispersed remote team. Your company can use time zones to its advantage by providing better access to customer service and remaining active online to engage with different markets. Of course, time and productivity management present challenges, but incorporating tech in HR can help. Specifically, you should consider implementing apps for work scheduling. These apps can give team members a simple and easy way to clock in and out, as well as automated time tracking and scheduling. This makes it easy to maximize remote productivity and elevate output in areas like social media and customer service.
Shipping and order fulfillment apps
With your sales process handled with plugins, you can consider apps that optimize the next steps in delivering your products—shipping and order fulfillment. Leading apps like Shipstation or Shippo can revolutionize how you approach these processes by providing real-time shipping rates, automating processes like label creation, and streamlining tracking. When integrated with your eCommerce plugin, this technology can effectively automate your whole shipping workflow while also reducing mistakes, equipping you to deal with more orders as you scale.
Marketing automation apps
Digital marketing is vital for growth in eCommerce, but as a small organization, you’ll likely need extra firepower to keep up with all the different tasks involved. Marketing automation apps can allow your marketers to outsource much of the repetitive processes involved in digital marketing. These platforms can be configured to handle send-outs in response to specific user behaviors on your site, such as sales cart abandonment, ensuring that the right message reaches the right people at the right moment. Some advanced tools also integrate paid social ads competitor analysis features, giving your team insights into how your campaigns stack up against others in your industry.
They can also automate the personalization of emails and the tracking of key metrics to help your marketing specialists drive customer engagement more effectively with less manual effort.
Embracing tech-driven efficiency
Operating an eCommerce business is a lot of work for both you and your employees, and the demands will only increase with success. To prepare yourself for the problems of progress as you scale, it’s a good idea to implement smart solutions early on. By embracing innovative plugins and apps like those we’ve discussed — and integrating resources like ad intelligence data to refine your outreach strategies — you can elevate your website functionality, streamline operations, and free up vital resources so you can pursue ever-increasing growth objectives.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Can plugins and apps really help small businesses save money?
Yes, plugins and apps serve to automate repetitive tasks and reduce manual errors. While they may require some initial investment or subscriptions, the reduction in operational costs and labor typically outweighs that, and the cost-efficiency increases with scale.
Are plugins easy to install and manage for non-technical users?
Typically, yes. Plugins are generally no-code solutions intended for non-technical users. Platforms such as POWR offer simple installation and setup, as well as intuitive interfaces that allow you to get up and running with plugins right away.
What should one consider when choosing plugins or apps for business?
The exact solutions you choose will depend on your business and its operational needs. However, for simplicity, ease of use, and scalability, prioritize plugins and apps that integrate well with one another and with your existing systems. This helps prevent conflicts between different software products and ensures seamless workflows.
The post Streamlining eCommerce: Plugins and Apps for Small Business Growth appeared first on Insights News Wire.