You sell products on the Internet, but you’re probably not alone in your market. Most likely, you’ve got at least one competitor. In these harsh economic times, ecommerce businesses especially have to remain more competitive than ever before, using every tool and every resource to help keep their ecommerce concern both viable and growing. It’s a shame to say, but not every ecommerce business can survive. The ones that do will be the ones most open to embrace change and to capitalize on the potential of new technologies.
The following short list outlines just some ways to gain an advantage over your competitors, giving you tools and strategies that will put you out in front of your ecommerce niche competitors.
Get Aggressive with SEO
Search engine optimization has grown in just a few short years from a loose and largely uncatalogued collection of hints and ideas into a concise, orderly method of effective online marketing. Modern SEO techniques include a variety of methods and means to help you business rise to the top of search engine rankings, using simple tools and easy approaches to your website design and online footprint.
There are many SEO tutorials available online. Some are free, but most aren’t, though help within the ecommerce community is also available free of charge. There are dozens of online chat rooms, message boards and forums, filled with ecommerce businessmen and experts. These areas are excellent resources to help you fine-tune your SEO mechanics without committing to a healthy expense.
Outsource Your Fulfillment Needs
Fulfillment refers to the series of steps and processes by which a company delivers a product to their customer. For most ecommerce businesses, this refers specifically to product or order fulfillment, in which a given product or goods is delivered to the customer via one of several shipping and delivery services.
By outsourcing your fulfillment needs to a third party fulfillment service company, you give yourself the freedom to develop your ecommerce business’ front end, including all SEO and marketing tools you need to gain greater visibility in the marketplace. By keeping the warehousing, shipping, processing and tracking fulfillment needs under the care of the logistics experts in your fulfillment service company, you also increase your shipping efficiency while at the same time keeping costs for those fulfillment areas under tight control. That in turn allows you to funnel more resources towards your business’ front end.