eCommerce businesses continue to expand more and more each year. Online shopping stats have skyrocketed due to the pandemic, and learning how to scale your business is crucial if you want to thrive in this day and age.
The difference between growing and scaling a business might get confusing. Growing a business means more staff, investments, and additional products, so it grows physically, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it gets more profit. Scaling, on the other hand, increases revenue, but without a big difference in costs.
If you want to scale your business but still struggle with doing it, keep reading. These four tips will guide you in the right direction.
Table of Contents
Build a Self-service Portal
With a self service portal, you get a website that helps customers with general procedures, like troubleshooting, onboarding, or user FAQs. That way, you get solutions to many common user problems.
Building a self-service portal will get your business a lot of benefits, including:
- Customer satisfaction
- Building trust and loyalty
- Higher prices for premium
- More customer traffic
- No need for staff support
- Personal feedback and recommendations
- Self-explanatory user resources
This solution is profitable because it raises your order value, keeps your customers happy, and lowers costs while increasing the price premium. With the help of this portal, you increase profitability while not having to spend much money and releasing the pressure from your support team.
It gets you immediate customer service responses and a higher success rate of solving problems. These portals are becoming the number one support solution for businesses and leave only about 20% of related tasks for staff to deal with.
Introduce E-procurement
Electronic procurement (e-procurement) is a procedure for ordering and purchasing products and services online. It is related to eCommerce but differs from it because it is only available to those who have registered. It encourages relationships with the preferred customers and suppliers via invoices, bids, and purchase orders.
E-procurement uses a system (for example, a web interface) that connects customers with suppliers. The purpose of using an e-procurement system is to acquire products at the best price and at the best time.
Businesses must establish a connection with suppliers to meet this goal, and arrange contracts. The suppliers are the ones who set limits and guidelines.
It significantly simplifies delivery times and optimizes performance. With the help of e-procurement, you negotiate purchases and save costs, limiting your unnecessary spending. You also access a greater selection of products and have more control of the inventory costs and size.
Because the e-procurement department is all automatic, there is no struggle with repetitive tasks, so you’ll save time and avoid manual mistakes. Since your information stays in one place, you’ll always be able to have insight into your company’s spending. If you want to know more about e-procurement and what is e-quoting, there are a lot of resources online that will help you understand whether these solutions are just what your B2B business needs.
Enhance Customer Service and Offer Free Shipping
Improving the customer service experience is essential when looking for ways to scale your business. With excellent service, customers tend to buy more from your brand, recommend and share your business on social media, give good feedback, and drive more traffic to your website.
If you struggle with enhancing customer service, here are some tips that can help you:
- Have a 24h phone support available at all times.
- Utilize customer satisfaction surveys.
- Create a live chat option.
- Respond to questions fast.
- Be present on social media.
- Create a referral program.
- Don’t underestimate email marketing.
With these tips, you will attract more customers, either online or through personal recommendations.
Offer free shipping options because this can make a difference in who a client chooses to do business with. A free shipping option is always desirable. It is so important that a client may quit the purchase if it comes with additional shipping costs and taxes.
Of course, you don’t need to put everything on free shipping immediately. Just don’t wait until the end of the purchase to inform about the shipping fees and costs. All the information has to be in the product description.
Besides free shipping, make sure that every product arrives in time because slow delivery is also the reason why some people lose motivation to buy from a company.
Be Mobile-friendly
Mobile optimization is a crucial thing you need to consider. Limiting customers to accessing your website only on computers limits your target audience, which further decreases your traffic and profit. More and more people tend to do online searches through tablets and smartphones these days, so optimizing for these devices is a game-changer.
Mobile engagement drives a lot of new audiences and if your website doesn’t have that option, your prospects will just do business elsewhere. Don’t miss the chance of having a mobile-friendly website.
Final Words
Scaling your business properly will help you outperform competitors and boost sales fast. By implementing these tips, your B2B eCommerce business will get to the next level, and you will provide valuable content and an outstanding customer experience.
Make sure that you are always available to your customers. Encourage your team members to give you feedback, review, and check everything regularly.
