Simplifying the Complexities of Multichannel eCommerce

This post was developed with insights and data from our partners at Solid Commerce. 

As the eCommerce landscape continues to evolve, omnichannel selling is becoming increasingly important, as well as complex, with consumer convenience becoming a top priority. When looking to scale your business and with the growing complexity of the front-end process, determining a back-end process that allows you to operate in this environment is crucial.

Selling across multiple online channels drives new customer acquisition and revenue but scaling the model and doing so profitably can pose a challenge. Below are three suggested opportunities to scale effectively. 

1. Stellar Customer Experience
2. Headless eCommerce
3. Leveraging Automation

Stellar Customer Experience

The omnichannel environment provides the opportunity to interact with customers across several different platforms. Each one of those platforms allow for a varying customer experience, dependent on device, platform, or even marketplace. This variation requires data presentation differently, but also allows you to build upon repetition and increase impressions to lead customers into a profitable buying position. With this opportunity also comes its challenges – exceptional customer experience is key to the brand promise, ensuring loyalty and profitability.

Delivering on the brand promise both upon purchase decision and post-purchase is a simple step to an exceptional customer experience. Upon purchase, product information is vital and content optimization provides an ease of information and structure.

Tech Stack & Headless eCommerce

When we asked Gary Chavez, the Chief Revenue Officer of Solid Commerce to explain headless ecommerce for us, he responded, “Headless ecommerce gives marketers and creatives the ability to tailor the customer experience to each sales channel while enabling operational efficiency through automation. Sales channels such as an online store, marketplaces, and social commerce have an optimized customer experience while operations are run by best-of-breed systems, such as order manager, inventory manager, accounting, and ERP. The sales channels are connected to the best-of-breed systems through integrating technology that make it possible to scale an ecommerce operation profitably”.

This separation allows customization of the front-end customer-centric piece and the back-end systems of record. These systems of record are the tools in your ecommerce ecosystem that help you manage the business end-to-end.

• Product catalog management tool
• Warehouse management solution
• Accounting systems
• Order managers
• Repricing tool
• CRM software

Leveraging Automation to Operate at Scale

• Move data to back-end-systems: moving purchase and customer data allows you to customize the front-end customer experience by separating it from the back-end systems.
• Product listing & optimization: optimizing property fields on a consistent basis ensures accuracy to create efficiency and an ease of scaling.
• Order & proximity routing: the fulfillment model and 3P is changing rapidly, so getting your order to the right place in an automated fashion is crucial to allow for expansion.
• Repricing: automating pricing strategies across your catalog and multiple marketplaces to maximize profits.
• Shipping rules: managing your profit margin around shipping fees.
• Inventory management: preventing inventory sellouts or creating scarcity to push urgency of purchase with automation.
• Customer communications: workflows to keep consistent communications with customers.

When it comes to marketplaces, it’s crucial to lead with marketing and advertising but it’s just as important having the back-end resources in place across all channels to allow for aggressive front-end management. Automating the scaling and complexity of the data lets brands focus on remaining competitive in the marketplace and innovating how they engage with their users – instead of worrying about monitoring front-end and back-end.

Feel free to reach out to us with questions, or for more details on this topic. 

Solid Commerce helps online sellers increase revenue by expanding reach to acquire new customers across multiple sales channels and increase operational efficiency through automation of orders, inventory, catalog, shipping, and price management.