8 Tips for Successful Scaling of your eCommerce Business

Improve Website Load Time

Regardless of how much you’ve invested in your eCommerce site and its functionality, the one thing that can hurt your ranking on Google is slow load times.

Load times are important because they provide an instant impression of the quality of a website. A slow loading site will appear amateurish, unprofessional, and unreliable to potential customers. This can result in low conversion rates, which means less sales for you.

Fortunately, there are several ways for you to improve your website’s load time:

• Test your site using Pingdom or GTMetrix (there are also mobile-specific tools like WebPageTest). These sites are free and easy to use; simply enter your URL into the search bar and scroll down until you see “Page Speed Analysis” near the bottom — this section shows how fast or slow pages load on different devices such as desktops vs smartphones vs tablets depending on what type of device a visitor uses when visiting their website (this will help determine if any changes need made before publishing).

Optimize Website for Search Engines

The first step in optimizing your website for search engines is to ensure that the keywords you use are relevant to your business. Use these keywords in your title, description, and heading tags, as well as in the content of your pages. When developing a new site, ensure it loads quickly, so users aren’t turned off by a slow loading time as mentioned earlier. Additionally, utilize a good hosting provider with plenty of options so you can scale up when necessary without having to change providers again later on down the line.
Last but certainly not least important: ensure you have a great domain name! The choice here will have an impact on how people perceive your brand—whether they think it sounds professional or amateurish will help determine whether or not they click through to see what else there might be on offer at this site (and if those other products might be worth their money).

Expand your Product Line

Another way to scale your eCommerce business is to expand your product line. This can involve adding new products that are related to your existing offerings or branching out into completely new categories.

Streamline Payment Process

Most eCommerce businesses use some form of payment processing. You can either outsource it to a service like Stripe or integrate with a payment gateway such as Stripe directly. If you’re selling on Shopify, there are plugins for both options that will make your life much easier.

• Use Paypal if you don’t want to deal with setting up accounts with other payment processors (and remember how much they love to screw people over).
• Use Stripe if you want something more flexible and customizable but still easy to set up and manage.

Optimize your Shipping Process

In order to scale your eCommerce business, you need to streamline the shipping process.

This means using a shipping management system that automatically calculates rates and applies discounts. It also means finding a third-party company that handles all of your orders, so you don’t have to worry about fulfilling them yourself. Lastly, it means working with a carrier who offers value-added services like free return shipping or tracking numbers in addition to competitive rates.

Implement an Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs help drive sales and boost your company’s bottom line. Affiliates are essentially third-party marketing partners that promote your products or services through social media, email marketing, blogs and other means. In exchange for this promotion, they may receive a commission on each sale they generate.

To set up an affiliate program:

• Create a dedicated page on your website with instructions detailing how affiliates can sign up and become approved to promote your products or services (the “Affiliate Program Page”). You can also include information about the types of promotions you offer (such as ebooks), how much it costs to join the program (the “Affiliate Program Fee”) and what benefits they receive once they’re approved (the “Benefits”).
• Create an account for yourself on whatever platform you plan to use as an affiliate management platform (AMP). AMPs allow you to manage all aspects of running an affiliate program by tracking activity across multiple platforms, setting goals for each campaign and paying commissions instantly. Some examples include Affiliate Window, ShareASale or LinkShare

Automate wherever Possible

Automation tools can save you a lot of time and effort, allowing you to focus on the parts of your business that really matter. The following are some ways in which automation can help you scale.

Conclusion

The good news is that you don’t have to do it all yourself, and there are plenty of tools available to help. These tips can get you started, but there are certainly more out there. As with any business, the key is to keep improving as you go along—and keep up with new developments in your industry!