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Automate to Accumulate – How to Scale Your Business

Webinar – Wednesday 11th March 2020 – 11am

Chris DawsonEditor & Co-founderTamebaywww.tamebay.com

Sandy ScottCEOVolowww.volocommerce.com

The start-up vs the scale-up

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“It has never been

easier to start…

but never harder to

scale!”• Marc Andressen, co-founder of Netscape and VC firm

Andreesen Horowitz, sits on Facebook Board of Directors

Starting vs Scaling

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• The start-up looks for sparks

• The start-up uses generalists

• The start-up guesses and tests

• The start-up has no formal processes

Images from icons8.com

• The scale-up adds fuel to existing fires

• The scale-up uses specialists

• The scale-up leverages data and doubles down

• The scale-up defines and automates processes

The unit cost mindset

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• Move from: • Move to:

“If I can maintain a 40% margin across

my products I should be ok.”

Photo by Elisa Michelet on Unsplash

“We need to understand costs for each

product and then price dynamically.”

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Monitoring unit costs

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• Staff costs (various)• Payment gateway costs

• Product cost price

• Deliver costs (goods in)

• Warehousing costs (incl. rent)

• Marketplace fees

• Marketing costs

• Customer service costs

• Return costs

• Shipping costs

• Tax• Handling costs

• Software & services fees

Data feeds for sustained growth

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“What would this look like if we increased the volume by 5 times? 10 times?”

• Integrate your product information

to your listing platform with feeds or

API to create new SKUs

automatically

Launching listings

• Automate the most common listing

revisions like stock levels and

pricing information between

systems and parties

Listing revisions

https://tamebay.com/2020/01/tamebay-2020-back-work-tips-sandy-scott.html

Automation for sustained growth

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• Take advantage of supplier

API/feed integrations to automate

the ingestion of product, stock level

and pricing information

Supplier interaction

• Can your drop-shippers update you

by API or feed on their product

catalogue, stock levels, order

placement and other notifications?

Drop-shipping

• Automate printing of pick-lists and

invoices, use barcode scanning at

packing to automate dispatch

updates and reduce costly errors

Pick, pack, dispatch

Scale best practices - listing

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• Focus your listing optimisation on the 20% that bring 80% of your sales

• Track and add trending keywords to your titles

• Make your descriptions super clear

• Add as many images as you you’re allowed

• Relist your stock after a set period to see an uplift in search ranking

• Automate your pricing formulas so your listings automatically reflect cost/price changes

• Use import scripts to build titles from custom fields and cut down on data duplication

• Use paragraph builders in emails, descriptions etc to avoid typing the same information

Scale best practices - marketplaces

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• Source your own product and create your own brands in categories where brands don’t prevail

• Look at which products are being bought together and create kits to grow your SKU count without adding products and to make it easier for your customers

• Add the other kit products as sponsored products in the related listings

• Use a 2- to 4-week cover rule when buying to ensure spend is on items selling well

• Take time to understand marketplaces, the skills required and the likely return

• Start a new marketplace with your best sellers and confirm the value

• Take advantage of marketplace offers to drive up margins

• Automate your stock levels across marketplaces and regions to prevent over/underselling

Scale best practices – orders and fulfilment

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• Set up dashboards for key parts of your business, like order processing

• Use courier automation rules to select the most effective parcel

• If your goods in are not barcoded, use your system to generate barcodes and print them when you take the goods in

• Providing tracking to parcels helps you combat fraud and protect profitability

• If you have a just-in-time model, leave your goods near the packing area and only put them away after you’ve picked the last order

• Scan items as you pack them, and have an image on screen, to eradicate packing errors

Scale best practices – customer service

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• Providing tracking numbers reduces customer enquiries

• Send your customers pack lists/invoices/tracking numbers electronically to save paper and time

• Use software to automate much of your customer service, to ease customer concerns and reduce work volumes

• include FAQs in the listing to avoid unnecessary inbounds

• For high value, high return SKUs, put an automatic hold on orders so customer service can call to confirm the order

• Don’t forget the ‘how was your purchase?’ email

Scale best practices - reporting

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What report Why

Best sellers It’s where to focus your listing optimisation efforts

Sales velocity See which products are trending up and trending down and act accordingly

Dead stock Know where your money is tied up, so you can end/relist or lower prices

Margin analysis Sales are vanity, profit is sanity. Build all the costs into each product to know true margin

Refund analysis Refunds kill profitability. Know which suppliers or regions are problematic and respond

Stock forecasting Set product order lead times to let the system calculate days to re-order and do the re-order for you. Or set minimum stock levels for the same benefit

Top customers Know who your best customers are so you can send them special offers for your website

Channel and cross-border Know where you being successful, and where you’re not

Customisable dashboards At-a-glance pictures of your performance, arranged the way you like them

9 customer favourites…

Future-proofing your business

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• Will this work for us in 5 years? 10 years?

• What SKU volume is it proven to handle?

• What order volume is it proven to handle?

• What degree of automation can it support?

• How does it integrate with other systems to allow us to scale our growth?

• What’s its reporting/BI like to let us easily see how the business is really performing?

• Do they have the expertise, time and commitment to see me grow and succeed?

• Are their payment plans structured to reflect this desire to see me grow and succeed?

• Who else similar to us has used the system and scaled like we want to?

9 questions to ask…

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Automate to Accumulate – How to Scale Your Business

Q&A – thanks for attending

Chris DawsonEditor & Co-founderTamebaywww.tamebay.com

Sandy ScottCEOVolowww.volocommerce.com