Crucial Life Lessons You'll Learn When Running an Online Shop

If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you! Your Customer is your best teacher. Since the commencement of your eCommerce store, you would’ve come across several problems and the way in which you handled it proves your mettle. Each and every problem provides you copious opportunity to learn and improve. Here are 10 life lessons you’ll learn when running an online eCommerce store.

1. Customers are well-informed

Customers often are well-informed about sales and product features. The question is, do they know more than your average employee? Surprisingly, the answer could be “yes”. Listen to your customers and you will not be let down. Improve your products and services based on the feedback to reach next level.

2. Being unique helps

Determining a unique selling proposition is a foundational step in any good brand strategy.  The goal is to differentiate your brand from your competitors, and give your customers a reason to purchase a product from you. It should highlight a story and the goal of your business.

3. Data is penultimate

Having clearly defined metrics that reflect your organization’s goals is key to setting the course for your business, whether long- or short-term. Understanding your goals for acquisition, retention and brand are essential to determining the data that’s most important to gauging your success. These patterns can create competitive advantages, and result in business benefits like more effective marketing and increased revenue.

4. Keep it simple

As your small business grows, it’s not always easy to keep your processes simplified. The more mature an organization becomes, more things accumulate and get in the way of performance. Complexity can be a major hindrance to the overall productivity of an organization as well as to the morale of employees.

5. Happy employees, happy company

For any company, one of its biggest assets is its employees. Having a talented and driven workforce will enable the company to achieve its goals efficiently, in time and will contribute to its growth. Employees often bring in skills, perspectives and knowledge that will help your company grow. This is why employee satisfaction needs to be one of your company’s top priorities to ensure that they stay motivated and so that attrition rates stay low.

6. Staying focused

Productivity requires focus. You want to get into a state of flow. This is especially true when doing something creative. Ideally you set the conditions for the muse to appear and help you get into a creative flow. It takes time to get to flow. If interrupted you have to go back to the start. The prep time to achieve a state of focused flow isn’t cumulative.

7. Focused marketing and analytics

A strong online presence can be the key to a business’s growth with increased exposure and better communication with potential and current customers alike, but what is the point of a fancy website and lots of online activity without a carefully thought out strategy? With great free tools such as Google Analytics there is every reason that any business no matter the size shouldn’t be using some form of web analytics program to measure the success of their digital strategy.

8. Being mobile friendly

Complete transition from PCs to mobile devices might take a while longer, but it’s hard to argue with how important those mobile devices have become to our daily lives. The best part of mobile marketing is that it can be customized for the user on the basis of his location and preferences by having a look at the consumer behavior, thereby, allowing proper segmentation and targeting.

Rather than seeing ecommerce businesses as the nemesis, traditional retailers can learn a lot by examining the tactics and practices of online retailers. Take one lesson at a time and start implementing it on your retail store.