6 things every e-commerce business must do well

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Onestop has a unique niche. Their niche isn’t to just focus on one thing; their niche is the ability to do everything. Onestop handles all aspects of e-commerce for major brands. When brick and mortar retailers like True Religion and Bonobos want to sell online, instead of trying to figure out the e-commerce on their own, they often outsource everything to Onestop.

 

“We essentially manage the e-commerce operations and backend for brands and retailers,” said CEO and co-founder John Tomich. 

 

Onestop has been around about 10 years and has offices in Santa Monica, New York City and a fulfillment warehouse in Rancho Dominguez. They’ve grown to over 50 large clients including Juicy Couture, Rag & Bone, Coffee Bean, Reef and CamelBak. From a decade of working with customers like those comes a lot of e-commerce knowledge. We spoke with Tomich at Tech Week Los Angeles to better understand online retailing. These are the six things every e-commerce business must have and do well.

 

Though not the most interesting or profitable part of an e-commerce business, warehousing and fulfillment is essential. When orders come to your site, you ship them out. When people return them you process the returns. Being efficient at this could make you Amazon.com. Being slow could kill your business.

 

Robots have never cut it in the customer service world. “If someone has a question about their order or if they want to find out how the product was fabricated they like to communicate with human beings about it, whether that is phone or email or live chat,” said Tomich.

 

Payments, the shopping cart engine, the purchase funnel process, the product descriptions and much more all need to work reliably on your website. 

 

Moreover, “there are a lot of third-party tools that people weave into their product tech platform to optimize things,” said Tomich. Product review for example. “That is a separate company that you have to license to get that customer review functionality.”

 

Solutions for technology vary. Smaller online retailers often use turnkey e-commerce sites like Magento or Shopify. Bigger companies like Best Buy use Oracle’s ATG. Often many in the middle outsource to companies like Onestop.

 

“Which platform you are going to use really depends on the scale and revenue of the business. What kind of revenue you are generating, how many custom features do you want built?” said Tomich.

 

You can’t just snap a picture on your iPhone. If products are going to sell well they need to look good. Professional product pictures make a big difference. If you are going to do it yourself be ready to take the photos, find models, mannequins and the proper background, and spend a lot of time in Photoshop. 

 

Websites have come a long ways since their early days. We now expect to be treated to a visually appealing online experience no matter what. If you are going to keep shoppers around, be prepared to consider site design, colors, typeface, the positioning of the navigation bar, whether you should have responsive web design and more.  

 

Furthermore, good UX requires a lot of A/B testing and data analysis. Good website design is never finished.

 

Driving traffic to your e-commerce site is different than drawing customers into brick and mortar operations. “You’re leasing store space because of the foot traffic that goes there,” said Tomich. However, online retailing “people don’t appreciate the work involved… You open a website and put it on the Internet no one is going to come. Zero.”

 

So how do you acquire customers on the Internet? You can use paid search, do search engine optimization, partner with affiliate sites, buy display advertising, buy native advertising, or engage shoppers on social media. The possibilities are endless, but not without cost and requiring labor.

 

“Everybody has to do these whether you are Ralph Polo Lauren or Wallmart.com. Whether you are doing billions of sales on your website or you are a small startup,” said Tomich.