Six Benefits of Hiring an Ecommerce Development Consultant
As your ecommerce business scales, you may wonder if it pays to hire a digital commerce development consultant to help with software recommendations, on-site ecommerce optimization and process management. Of course, you may also be concerned that an ecommerce consultant will seek to sell you software upgrades or web development services you may not need.
The main benefits of hiring an ecommerce development consultant
If your website is working fine and your ecommerce software hasn’t reached its end of life, do you really need ecommerce consulting? Yes!
A good, trustworthy ecommerce consultant does more than recommend products. Often, an outside perspective delivers the knowledge you need to scale successfully.
Let’s dive deeper into the multiple benefits of hiring an ecommerce consultant.
Benefit from an outsider’s view of your organization
Gaining an outsider’s perspective on your business can help drive your success. Ecommerce software consultants work with dozens of firms and see the strategies and tactics that work and those that don’t.
Any organization can get stuck in an echo chamber that inhibits innovation. Beyond just making software recommendations or managing ecommerce optimization on your site, a good ecommerce consultant can help you re-imagine your business processes and marketing strategies. If you have the people on staff to execute the tactics, an ecommerce consultant can provide a roadmap to success.
Gain insights to deliver a better customer experience
Whether you struggle with site speed issues and page load times, a diminished user experience or shopping cart snags, an ecommerce consultant can spot these problems and recommend fixes.
Often, you don’t need to re-platform but make tweaks on your current site that can reduce abandoned carts and increase conversions.
Improve workflow with tips from your ecommerce consultant
Does your organization struggle with data entry errors that throw off inventory counts? Do you often suffer from inefficient workflows, relying on manual processes that slow down work progress or introduce mistakes or logjams?
Drawing on years of experience helping other ecommerce firms, your consultant can examine your business processes and software to recommend appropriate solutions.
Identifying areas of your business that could benefit from workflow automation can lead to a better bottom line. Eliminating repetitive tasks like purchase order management, vendor and supplier onboarding, inventory management and even customer experience and support leads to time savings to potentially hundreds of hours a month. Workflow automation can remove data entry errors and increase productivity, allowing your organization to focus on the things that will move your company forward and not stay bogged down in the minutiae of day-to-day operations.
Maintain a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace
An omnichannel approach to ecommerce can help your brand gain or maintain an edge against competitors. But if your software isn’t synced across channels, you could miss out on sales opportunities or keep customers waiting too long for products to ship. Out-of-date inventory information ultimately tarnishes the customer experience, resulting in negative reviews, lost sales, and lost potential.
On the other hand, an ecommerce software consultant can help ensure integration across all your platforms for proper data flow. Your online and store inventory should be synced across all channels – including in-store sales, your website, Amazon, and other channels. Accurate inventory ensures you don’t oversell products. Happy customers who receive their products on time are more likely to spread the word to their friends. An ecommerce consultant can provide you with tools to help create not just loyal, repeat customers but additional word-of-mouth sales.
An ecommerce software consultant can help ensure consistent data flow and inventory management across all sales channels.
Discover and explore new sales channels with guidance from your ecommerce consultant
Ecommerce success involves more than just SEO or paid search to drive traffic to your website. You can use omnichannel marketing to reach consumers through:
- Social media campaigns (paid and organic)
- Video
- SMS
- Geotargeting
- Voice search
- Direct email
- Point-of-sale advertising
An ecommerce consultant can help open your eyes to new sales channels and innovative ways to reach your audience – often without a significant technology investment. By leveraging omnichannel campaigns, you’ll extend your reach to new audiences and touch consumers when they are ready to buy.
An ecommerce consultant can help you evaluate your platform
An ecommerce software consultant explores various ways to improve your site’s performance and capabilities without re-platforming.
Professional ecommerce consultants focus on platform-agnostic, iterative improvements to your site. We don’t want to sell you a website redesign or features you don’t need unless we can demonstrate the benefits.
But if your ecommerce software really is approaching its end of life, an ecommerce consultant can guide you through the re-platforming process. A scalable, open-source solution can help you take your business to the next level.
Let Acro Commerce help you create a roadmap to ecommerce success with our ecommerce consulting services. If you’re ready to revisit your strategies and scale your ecommerce business, reach out to us now to learn more.
