Leveraging Digital Commerce Consultants To Build For The Future
Keeping your ecommerce business running effectively while ensuring customers are getting the service they deserve is no easy task. In fact, it’s usually a whole list of tasks requiring your time and attention. It’s no wonder that few businesses have the time or resources to look out to the horizon to see what changes in software and related technologies may be on the way. But focusing on only the here-and-now of your business can have devastating consequences, causing you to miss out on critical new industry-wide best practices or to spot a white space in the market that you can easily step in to fill.
Working with an ecommerce software consultant not only helps you solve the challenges you’re facing today but will put your business in a position to take advantage of ecommerce trends and new opportunities that may be coming your way in the future. Here, we dive into exactly how it works.
What leveraging an ecommerce software consultant can do for your future planning:
- Allows your company to benefit from others’ experiences. Whatever issues you may be facing, there are other companies who have faced similar issues, and our consultants have helped solve them.
- Building your toolbox from multiple vendors. We know that no single vendor can provide all the tools you need. We can make the process of bringing all those vendors together in one toolbox simple.
- Cost reduction investment. A large part of an ecommerce consultant’s job is to help you be more efficient, improve productivity and in the long run, reduce costs by investing in a plan that streamlines all areas of your business.
Benefiting from others’ experiences
Every ecommerce business is unique in its way, but there are also many similarities between your business and others. Whatever issues you may be facing, there are other companies who have faced similar issues, if not the same. By working with an ecommerce consultant, you can benefit from the work they’ve done with other clients and gain from these experiences.
Suppose, for example, your website has been slowing down or generating errors during peak traffic times. If you’re working with an Acro Commerce consultant, they will be able to show you what has worked for other clients, both large and small. For instance, Acro Commerce helped Telus Mobility work through its issues by building a secure, flexible platform and by bringing all of the code and data in-house so the company wouldn’t be dependent on vendor platforms during high traffic times.
The result was that when Apple released its latest iPhone, Telus Mobility owned the only ecommerce website that didn’t crash during the pre-order rush — something Apple itself hadn’t been able to avoid.
Planning your own future toolbox
Software vendors always have a bright vision of the future, and they spend millions every year showing customers how they can shape their businesses into that vision by using the tools and services they are authorized to sell you. But if you have your own vision for your company’s future, you’ll likely need access to more tools and different perspectives than those offered by a single vendor. You shouldn’t have to change your business to accommodate the software that’s available from one company.
This is where an ecommerce consultant comes in. They don’t work for a vendor; they work for you. If there’s a new web technology or an open source solution you can use to do what your business needs, for example, your consultant can explain the strengths and limitations of each and how you can get those solutions to work with the software you already have.
A great example of how an ecommerce consulting firm works toward their client’s goals is the work Acro Commerce did with Bug Out Bag Builder, a company as unique as each of its customers. Together, they were able to build an open source in-house platform that integrated seamlessly with Amazon’s services, while offering BOBB’s customers the ability to customize their own products. Take a look at the case study and BOBB’s own website to see how well it went.
Investing in cost reduction
A large part of an ecommerce consultant’s job is to help your business be more efficient, improve productivity and reduce costs. Payroll expenses, for example, are something most businesses expect to increase as the company grows and will take this added expense for granted, even when innovation in ecommerce may make it unnecessary.
Even companies that are using the latest order-fulfillment software are still often unnecessarily doing things manually, like processing product returns manually, or having staff intervene personally over the phone when customers want to buy out-of-stock items. While a human touch is sometimes the right call, if you can improve customer satisfaction without hiring more staff, isn’t that something you should explore before automatically hiring more employees?
The good news is that working with an ecommerce software consultant from Acro Commerce doesn’t cost you anything upfront. You can talk to a member of their team and get to know what they can do for you with no strings attached.
Why not find out what you’ve been missing out on and contact them today?
