While 2023 may feel a bit unpredictable so far, one thing is for sure: Ecommerce is different than it has been over the last several years.
But anomalies aside, ecommerce has been, and always will be, a swift-moving channel. What worked last year or the year before may look very different today. Strategies for the online channel must continuously evolve, no matter what the macro environment looks like.
Brands that don’t adapt along the way risk not being able to think more strategically or carry out bigger growth initiatives. From embracing the fundamentals to flexing your approach to different elements of the online business, it all adds up to a recipe for ecommerce success.
These are the most common things brands are doing (or not doing) that are holding back their ecommerce business right now:
Lack of Strategic Promotional Participation
Maybe you still haven’t ramped up promotions to pre-2020 levels, or your promotional calendar doesn’t have much rhyme or reason behind it. But promotions are once again a key growth driver in ecommerce right now and how brands are staying competitive in the market.
A strategic promotional calendar takes several things into consideration:
- Major holidays: President’s Day, Labor Day, Cyber 5 (to name a few). Consumers expect to see savings during holiday periods and brands should partner with retailers to ensure they’re a part of any sales during these times.
- Brand-wide promotions: You can dictate the timing of these for your brand, taking into consideration your category, any associated seasonality and your key retailers’ promotional calendars.
- Retailer exclusives: Offering a promotion to retailers for an exclusive period is a great way to build on your partnership and experiment with sales strategies.
Promotions are a critical part of staying competitive in a price-first online world.
Not Engaging with Retailers
We talk about deepening engagement with retailers often, but what does it really mean. Is seeing them twice a year at market enough?
While face time is part of it, deepening engagement is more about treating your retailers as strategic partners, and ensuring they see you as one for them. That could mean having regular conversations about their business to ensure you understand how your brand fits into it and what they need from you; using retailer scorecards to identify issues and working through them together; or collaborating on sales and marketing plans to ensure the right approach. (Shameless plug—this is a huge part of what BrandJump does for our clients)
Another important relationship-building piece is a willingness to say “yes.” Retailers want to work with brands who are open to experimentation and finding what works to drive sales. A brand that’s willing to do this has more opportunities to work with buyers on a strategic level.
Lackluster Lifestyle Imagery
Or, worse—no lifestyle imagery. Having product imagery that shows your product “in situ” is especially important for home furnishings. Shoppers want to be able to envision something in their own home, or aspire to a beautiful space they see on the product page.
Not all lifestyle images are created equal. Strong imagery both informs and inspires, giving the end consumer another view of the product and showing its potential. That means products should be shown in residential settings, without many distractions and in styles that appeal to a mass audience.
Secondly, don’t save lifestyle imagery for a secondary task months after a new product release. Prioritizing it as part of a launch will let you capitalize on the momentum and can give your retail partners resources to help market and promote it to their customers.
Releasing New Products Once or Twice a Year
Speaking of new product releases—brands that are experiencing strong growth are releasing product three to four times a year.
When the BrandJump team talks to retailers to ask what more brands can be doing, this is often the first topic to come up. Having a strong cadence of new releases throughout the year means more “newness” in front of retailers (and their customers). This gives your partners more chances to promote and drive exposure for your brand, away from the typical post-trade show timing that most brands are following.
If you’re still launching product just once or twice a year at trade shows, consider breaking those releases up into smaller batches and presenting them more frequently.
High Return Rates
It’s no secret that returns are expensive, earth un-friendly and can damage relationships with your partners if they aren’t mitigated. And while some rate of return is inevitable with the sight-unseen nature of shopping online, they are ways to deter them.
Product content is often a prime culprit behind high return rates. Take a look at the product page and ask:
- Are you providing everything the customer needs to confidently buy something without seeing it in person?
- Is the information in the right format and easy to understand?
- Are swatches accurate?
- Are product details complete?
- Is everything communicated clearly?
- Are there any unanswered questions?
For example, a product’s dimensions may be listed in the product details, but adding a scale drawing or an image that shows comparative size could be a better way of ensuring a shopper sees and fully understands the measurements of an item before purchasing it.
If any of your products are experiencing a high return rate, getting to the bottom of it quickly and course correcting is key.
Volatile Inventory or Operations
With home furnishings still riding a wave of unpredictable demand, inventory has been especially challenging for manufacturers. But maintaining inventory consistently is central to an ecommerce strategy, for a few reasons.
One, it lets retailers see you as a reliable partner. They don’t have to be concerned about orders that can’t be fulfilled or products disappearing from the website.
Maintaining stock also serves to keep your positioning on retailer sites. Retailer algorithms favor products with solid in-stock rates (among other factors), and going out of stock means starting completely over to work your way up in position.
It also ensures your products stay on the website altogether. Many sites remove products with zero or low inventory and don’t take backorders—so if you’re not in stock, the end customer never even sees your product.
Brands that are performing well are maintaining upwards of 90% in-stock rates, so that’s a good benchmark to consider when inventory planning for your online channel.
Going hand-in-hand with inventory is ensuring smooth operations, especially ship times. It's important that you have the inventory, and then that you ship it when you say you will. Not doing so not only damages relationships with retailers and the end customer, but it can also impact algorithm positioning or cause chargebacks or fines.
Not Moving Fast Enough
Remember in the beginning we talked about ecommerce moving quickly? That applies to the day-to-day as well, and brands need to be able to seize opportunities as they arise.
Marketing or promotional opportunities often come up at the last minute but can offer the brand a chance to get into a program with less competition or greater exposure. But if there’s a lot of red tape and you can’t opt in quickly enough, that opportunity can be lost.
Brands should have a decision-maker who can respond or act quickly to these opportunities. That doesn’t mean leaving it all to chance—you can set parameters or guardrails to ensure stakeholders are aligned and use those to gauge opportunities and expedite decision-making to ensure you don’t miss a chance to drive sales.
Investing time and resources into these areas may feel like a monumental lift right now, but they are opportunities for brands to gain market share in a challenging economic environment. Figuring out how to implement these into your strategy sets your business up for growth now and in the future—and will enable you to continue to build.
Taking a proactive approach is the difference between brands that continue on a growth trajectory and those that stay stagnant.
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