Running an e-commerce site can be hard, grueling work. To be the most effective storefront possible, site managers have to maintain a ton of isolated focus across numerous channels of information as well as help maintain a personable face for the company. As you might imagine, this can end up wearing an online entrepreneur thin, no matter his or her level of expertise in SEO, SEM or business management in general. That’s especially true if that person is attempting to manage everything without a partner or employees in tow.
For those thinking about getting into e-commerce or people who’ve already tried their hand at it but came to realize they need some substantial assistance, there are a few tricks you can stuff up your sleeves to keep your workflow efficient and your revenue maximized. Depending on where you believe your shortcoming might be when managing an online marketplace, the three following services will not only help you get the job done quickly, but they can help lead directly to surpassing your direct competitors and making a real name for your store.
WiseAssortment
Although it’s just one tool out of Wiser’s incredible selection, WiseAssortment can still help manage a significant portion of your time invested in competitor research. It works by comparing the items available through your marketplace against any other competitor’s e-commerce site. With that information, it will display a number of valuable insights like percentage of product overlap, total items for sale on each site and more. This can be used by store owners to effectively determine where their inventories are sorely lacking and help quickly address this problem.
What makes that so valuable is that shoppers will be more likely to purchase a number of items from one store rather than visit multiple e-commerce shops in an attempt to get the lowest price on every single item.
Smart Insights
Staying on top of the latest best practices for online marketing is itself a full time job, but the folks over at Smart Insights has you covered if you want to stay ahead of your competitors and maintain a foothold with your online marketplace. They offer free and “Expert” memberships, both which come with marketing newsletters and planning templates to help get a business talked about.
However, the paid membership comes with a plethora of guides, usable marketing templates, online strategy tools and training courses to keep a digital storefront (or any other site for that matter) ahead of the game by leaps and bounds. Their instruction alone on using an integrated communications approach alone is worth looking into Smart Insights, but every aspect of membership is positioned to help increase sales – even with a small project budget and minimal resources.
Oktopost
Where most social media management suites center around general audience building and outreach, Oktopost was designed specifically for revenue solutions. The team’s focus on B2B product development translates incredibly well for high-profit single-item niche shops like medical technologies or electronics, and that translates remarkably well into B2C sales for similarly-targeted purchases.
Oktopost’s lead generation and tracking analytics make talking to and converting your followers and likers a little too easy with tools like scheduled content distribution, results tracking and third-party platform integration among others. With this service, you’ll not only get the chance to be seen by your target demographic, but you’ll get to talk to them face-to-face… in the figurative sense, of course.