5 Ways to Free Up Your Time for Strategic Sales Efforts in E-commerce
Being an E-commerce entrepreneur means wearing many, many different hats.
Being a successful entrepreneur, however, means managing your time efficiently and handling various processes without burning out or letting key opportunities slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, the constant threat of scope creep and the incessantly high-paced tempo of running an E-commerce marketplace can quickly wear you down.
That’s why you need to invest your time, focus, and resources into strategic sales efforts, making sure that your time is truly your own—and that it’s not eaten up by menial tasks. Balancing daily operations with this type of strategic planning for your business can seem like a difficult undertaking, but there are some key steps you can take to ensure success.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the five ways you can free up your time and focus on strategic sales.
Automate Routine Tasks
AI Chatbots for Customer Service
Artificial intelligence is spearheading the automation revolution in the E-commerce industry. With the recent generative AI boom, businesses can streamline their processes and reduce their expenses by automating critical and repetitive tasks.
One of the areas where AI is currently thriving is customer service. Responding to customer queries is a huge time commitment, but you need to make sure that no query goes unanswered, as you want to maximize leads.
Integrating an AI chatbot is one of the best AI tools you can use to capture leads and guide potential customers to a point of sale on your marketplace. To ensure brand consistency, make sure to train your chatbot to represent your brand’s tone of voice and personality.
Automated Inventory Management
Inventory management is another process that you need to automate—not just for the sake of efficiency but also for accuracy and customer satisfaction.
With the right inventory management system, you can minimize the risk of error, eliminate manual data entry, get real-time stock updates, free up human resources, and more. Most importantly, this system integrates directly into your marketplace so that all the inventory information there is accurate and up to date.
Automated Accounts Payable
Tying directly into inventory management, you need to build stronger and more cost-effective relationships with your suppliers. One of the best ways to do that is through accounts payable automation, which allows you to make timely payments and ensure product availability on your marketplace.
With good accounts payable management come good supplier relationships, which will translate into better deals and prices for your customers down the road.
One of the best automations you can use here is CS-Cart’s split payments, which allows you to automatically forward payments to merchants and get the commission at the same time. This ensures no manual work and eliminates the risk of error when splitting payments between you and the merchants. Make sure to check out all our marketplace features.
Outsource Non-Core Activities
Hiring Virtual Assistants
There are many daily tasks that you need to handle that can be difficult or even impossible to delegate to AI. This is where virtual assistants come in. An assistant can take over numerous repetitive but somewhat complex tasks that regularly eat away your time and mental energy.
For example, a virtual assistant can take over scheduling all your meetings, online and offline. They can also manage your emails, declutter your inbox, and help you focus on the right opportunities and conversations. And, of course, a virtual assistant is great when you need manual data entry or when creating executive summaries.
Content Creation
Another time-consuming process you can outsource is content creation. Now, while you might be tempted to try your luck with AI content creation, keep in mind that generative AI is not at a level where it can consistently create the content you need to thrive as an E-commerce marketplace.
And remember, content comes in numerous forms – text, video, images, and more. You need all of those types of content when you’re looking to build an E-commerce website that converts, as well as for ongoing campaigns and marketing efforts.
With that in mind, you can outsource content creation to a reputable service provider, such as photographers and videographers for your products, and professional copywriters to enrich your marketplace with SEO and creative writing.
Leverage Data Analytics
Analytics Tools
Data analytics in E-commerce is a complex, multifaceted process that demands a centralized platform and that you use the right tools to gather and interpret data. This process is also very time-consuming, and it’s best to outsource it to professional data analysts.
Some of the top data analytics tools for marketplaces include:
- Google Analytics
- Google Tag Manager
The data analytics tools you use will be essential in strategic decision-making, demand sensing and forecasting, pricing, and more.
Automated Reporting
Automated reporting eliminates the need to manually turn data into insights and eliminates the risk of error in the process. Using a centralized reporting dashboard is essential for a consistent data overview.
As a business leader, you also need to be able to glance at the most important data points and trends so that you can make strategic decisions without wasting time.
Optimize Marketing Efforts
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to all the tools you use to automate marketing tasks and consolidate multi-channel campaigns, interactions, and customer touchpoints. Automating marketing processes leads to better customer engagement and higher personalization, which in turn leads to higher conversion and retention.
Using a robust CRM is a great way to automate numerous lead generation and nurturing tasks and leverage prospect data to incentivize conversion or convince a potential customer to come back to your site.
Streamline Product Management
Product Information Management Systems
Managing, updating, and storing product information manually is an impossible task when you’re running an online marketplace. With so many moving parts, numerous merchants, and thousands of products to manage, it’s important to use product information management to do this automatically, consistently, and accurately.
A PIM is a centralized system where all the product information is stored, ensuring consistency and data quality across all your sales and marketing channels. This is essential for efficient and accurate marketplace management, as a PIM helps you build a better customer experience and improve the up-sell and cross-sell potential of all product categories.
Efficient Communication with Stakeholders
Lastly, communicating with stakeholders efficiently and effectively is essential to your long-term plans and strategies, as well as for business alignment and course correction where needed. That said, these meetings are often time-consuming, especially when you are doing them one-on-one.
You can save time and streamline this process with a stakeholder interview template, which you can use to define a key set of questions and talking points for every meeting. This ensures you don’t accidentally overlook any important details and feedback during the meeting and that you gather the right information to take your marketplace to the next level.
A template is also great as a reference card, which you can use to get your points across and communicate effectively with the stakeholders without wasting time on preparation.
Conclusion
Building a successful E-commerce business means investing time and effort into strategic planning and making strategic decisions that will future-proof your company and ensure long-term sales. To do that, however, you need to be able to free yourself from the clutches of menial and repetitive tasks, as well as any other time drains that may be hindering your performance as a business leader.
With that in mind, make sure to automate routine tasks, outsource the activities that are not essential for your business, leverage the right data, optimize marketing, and streamline product management. You can do all of this with the right marketplace platform that works out of the box, so get in touch with us to learn more about CS-Cart’s online marketplace and how it can help your business thrive.
Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.