In today’s day and age, the thought of taking your business online sounds absolutely normal. After all, the general advice seems to be that if your business doesn’t have an online presence, its chances of success are much slimmer.
However, if you look hard enough, plenty of bricks and mortar stores don’t have that elusive online presence. Or, if they do, its limited to a basic webpage that doesn’t offer users any sort of ecommerce functionality.
It’s when you take this plunge that your business really can take a leap. It can go from a small player to a huge brand (albeit with a lot of marketing luck along the way).
If you are contemplating the above, today’s post will now take a look at some of the possible implications that your business might need to think about.
How will you store more items?
Hopefully, this is already one issue you have thought of. After all, if you are taking your business online, it’s probably to expand your operations.
For this reason, you’ll need more storage. Of course, you don’t know the scale of your operation yet, so you’ve got to tread carefully. If you don’t get premises that are big enough, you won’t have capacity to expand. At the same time, if you go the other way, the risks obviously increase.
This is why you should really mull over your options for business storage, and see if any temporary solutions work out for you.
Do you have the staff to cope?
By the same token, you have got to consider the manpower element. After all, with a lot more orders to contend with, just who in your team is going to fulfil these?
Again, you’ve got to be careful and not hire too many or too few people. A lot of companies will turn to temporary staff as they assess their new business landscape and see just how much busier they are going to become.
How will you deal with the increased effect of seasonality?
Sure, seasonality affects every business and if you have been on the high-street for a number of years, you’ll know all about this. For some companies it is at Christmas, while for others it might be during the warmer months.
When it comes to an online operation, everything is multiplied though. You’re now potentially targeting the whole world and this means you need to think very carefully about how you approach the S-word.
Furthermore, there are a lot of issues out of your control that can contribute to these peaks and troughs. For example, you might lose your natural search engine rankings in Google. Or, CPCs might increase which mean you can’t appear as prominent on paid search activities. All of these issues mean that you need to prepare for moments of inconsistency.
What about shipping?
Finally, just how will your items go from A to Z? For years, you may have been used to a storefront, but now you need a reputable carrier. This is a surprisingly hard task to get on top of; you don’t want to be paying through the nose for shipping to customers, but at the same time you need a carrier who is going to preserve your company’s reputation.
