Starting out with an online business is certainly not easy as it sounds and does involve a lot of planning, preparation along with a sound understanding of the ground realities of the business. An entrepreneur who is serious about embarking on the journey must be equipped with the knowledge and wisdom for launching a business online in the most seamless manner.

This can only happen when an entrepreneur establishes contact and takes helps from experts or consultants who are conversant with ecommerce business as a speciality. Consultant for an online business come with the knowledge and expertise for launching an ecommerce business in the most streamlined fashion by providing foresight on crucial aspects that go into making an ecommerce venture a success. Ecommerce website consultants or internet business consultants come with exposure to online businesses in various niches and categories.

This write-up seeks to interest readers, who are keen on starting an ecommerce business, and want to engage consulting agencies or are already active names in online space and seek consulting services. Online business consulting services of YRC are known to implement ideas and streamline existing online business processes. The effort here is to list out challenges that a typical online business entrepreneur is likely to encounter when launching their online venture. We have tried listing out these challenges one-by-one below:

Business Ideal Validation

In the beginning, an entrepreneur is faced with the daunting task of validating his/ her business idea in regard to the demand of their products, lucrative geographies where the products would do well and adoption of specific short and long term business strategy that would bring results.

An entrepreneur who is equipped with answers to these questions would be in a better position to transform his ideas from a vision into reality. Moreover, pertinent answers to such questions would allow a business to adopt effective strategies in the right direction. The challenge posed by such questions can be effectively answered by e-commerce market research, which can be an integral component in getting business off the ground.

IT Infrastructure/ IT Solutions Planning

Any entrepreneur who is keen on setting up an ecommerce business is faced with a dilemma when it comes to technology adoption. Today, the market offers a range of options for an entrepreneur to choose from and making the right decision is not an easy task. Also, there is a host of technological solutions that need to be integrated into an ecommerce platform that includes order and inventory management, CRM tool, digital performance management along with analytics, various marketplaces and so on.

At times, you would even have to involve multiple vendors to get all your IT needs to be fulfilled. In the end, it becomes a little unsettling in getting all the vendors aligned to a common goal. The answers to such a situation lie in partnering with an e-commerce consulting firm like YRC, which come with expertise in defining IT business infrastructure and service level agreements for IT vendors along with their scope mapping.

We short-list the best-fit solutions for your business and streamline the integration of multiple IT systems together to implement a robust back-end IT infrastructure for your e-commerce business. Besides, YRC offers a comprehensive IT system integration in the form of articulate SOPs that can drive the entire IT needs for the business.

Hiring In-house Team v/s Agency

One of the most pertinent questions when it comes to setting up a business is with regard to the team you are assembling. An effective team can make a difference between making or breaking a business. This would require an entrepreneur to look at hiring options and ideally select an agency to fulfil his/ her hiring needs.

The agency would have to be communicated about the team size you have in mind and the kind of qualifications you are looking for in a team member. Also, being a start-up you would have constraints with budget and would be even looking at employing freelancers. Here you would have to select processes that could be outsourced and decide the quantum of payouts for the selected freelancers.

All such decision-making in regard to hiring and recruitment need not be done all by yourself. You can partner with YRC which can define the organisation structure for your ecommerce business with scope for freelancers and in-house team members/ employees along with their roles and responsibilities. We define KRAs and KPIs and work closely with the recruitment agency in getting the right candidate selected for the job. At YRC we are known for our services for defining organizational structure and HR consulting.

Implementing Best Practices

While starting a business you would have a close eye on the potential competitors and would want to implement best practices that have become the norm within your industry.

We at YRC can help implement industry best practices by defining SOPs across business functions which can include order and inventory management, Customer Care, CRM, accounts management and procurement or production. At YRC, we believe that ecommerce can be best served by implementing well-defined and articulated SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) that serve immediate and long term business interests.

Ecommerce Project Management

For running an ecommerce business, you would be closely associating with multiple teams and agencies. It can include services such as website development, digital marketing, content development, branding, photography, courier agencies, designers and so on. Selecting the right agency, defining their SLA (Service Level agreements) and scope mapping of work can be a formidable task by all counts. Not to mention the job of coordination and getting the work done.

By partnering with YRC, you can be assured of the agencies not being unreasonable with their work ethics and the overall work delivery along with the completion of the project happens within stipulated timelines. We offer specialised services called Ecommerce Start-up consulting specially aligned to the needs of ecommerce businesses.

Go-to-market & Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

Almost all the major ecommerce marketing strategic initiatives are closely aligned to digital marketing. Plus effective online marketing plays a major role in the successful launch of an ecommerce brand. At YRC, we have a specialized in-house team provides in-depth consultancy and implementation of digital marketing initiatives, and we have a specialized E-Commerce strategy consulting team of experts that helps online e-commerce brands to get the best ROI and desire performance from marketing campaigns.

Pre-launch Planning

Various events have to happen concurrently for the successful launch of an e-commerce brand. Starting from online marketing campaigns for traction to UAt testing and fixing the website for bugs/ errors. All have to happen in a seamless manner to ensure the brand can deliver a first-in-class experience from day one. We at YRC come with experience in launching ecommerce brands in the most visible & functional manner to ensure the customer gets the best value proposition.

Business Automation

Ideally, an ecommerce brand should be able to deliver the best customer experience with the least number of customer concerns. However, in reality, not many brands can deliver along these lines and most of it has to do with the lack of standardization of processes which limits the scope for automation.

Our in-house experts from YRC are conversant with various automation strategies that can easily be implemented based on the standardization of business processes as ecommerce solutions. Implementation of process automation can go a long way in streamlining various aspects of a business that are known to cause customer concerns.

Conclusion

Ecommerce consultants or online business consultants at YRC (Your Retail Coach) come with specialized knowledge and expertise in helping online business entrepreneurs from ideation to execution. We have in-house capabilities to assist online businesses right from the launch of the brand to help streamline day-to-day business operations. In addition, if you are already active in the online space as an ecommerce brand, we can help you implement the best industry practices which can prepare you for the automation in business processes and enhance your customer experience (CX).

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