Where do you see your startup or home based ecommerce business in a year’s time from now? Have you thought about making a five year plan? While planning for tomorrow is sometimes tricky given the upheaval of the present, setting long range goals for yourself and your business is an important part of making sure your business grows healthily and responsibly. You wouldn’t take a road trip to a new place without a map, and you shouldn’t steer your ecommerce business without a destination in mind.
Many small business and ecommerce business owners take the time to block out development and growth goals on a yearly or monthly level, devising rough outlines of projects to undertake and challenges to confront. Some of the more common long-range goals are listed just below.
Maximize Your Landing Page
Your landing page is like the front entrance and windows of your online store, and as in real life first impressions count for a lot. One of the most important things you can do for your business is establish a welcoming and friendly landing page, free of clutter and decidedly non-aggressive in its sales presentation. It should also be colorful enough and with enough aesthetic sense to encourage the viewer to stay and browse category pages, as well.
The landing page is also a great place to start building your SEO, including links to article directories on your site and embedding keywords. Along with the landing page, your About and FAQ sections should also be welcoming and non-confrontational, letting the viewer know that shopping at your online store will be a pleasant experience.
Outsource Your Fulfillment
Fulfillment outsourcing affords business owners the freedom to concentrate on their front end delevopment without the distractions of logistics management, warehouse management and maintenance, and an array of other problems. By committing to a partnership with a third party fulfillment service company, you arrange for many of your most time-consuming management expenses to disappear, virtually overnight.
Fulfillment service companies deduct a percentage of each product sold as their cost for completing their client business’ order fulfillment obligations. These obligations include all areas of the order fulfillment process, from warehousing to order shipment and even tracking and customer service after delivery. This percentage-based profit structure gives them a powerful motivation to make sure your website’s inventory is quickly and reliably process and delivered.