Your ecommerce team is a skilled group of individuals who know strategy and online sales like the backs of their hands. That’s why you hired them—they know their stuff. Your ecommerce team is also something else: overworked.
Caught up in the minutiae of managing an online brand, many ecommerce teams like yours are failing to realize their full potential. They’re getting bogged down with the task of putting out fires and managing too many ecosystems, platforms, and marketplaces at once when they should be creating innovative solutions and growth for your business. While this might not seem like a big problem initially, it will eventually burn up both your talent and your profits.
Why are ecommerce teams overworked?
Ecommerce is a far bigger animal than it used to be, and many brand leaders aren’t as equipped to wrangle it as they think they are. Ecommerce doesn’t just involve creating and managing a D2C website anymore. It involves working with various sales platforms, live chats, SEO, advertising and marketing, social media, shipping logistics, marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart, online listings, MAP pricing, price control, and more. Brands finding the most success in ecommerce aren’t only managing all of these areas well, but they’re hitting it out of the park across multiple channels. That takes a lot of time and resources.
A small ecommerce team can’t manage all of these things on their own. No matter how talented they might be, something will always slip through the cracks, and too many CEOs make the burden worse by not realizing the breadth of the issue. As a brand leader, you stifle your ecommerce team’s ability to give you strategic direction and innovation by giving them too many things to do and not enough support or resources to do it. It’s crucial that you have the right priorities in order to maximize their potential.
Unleashing your ecommerce team’s potential
Your end goals are to have innovation that beats the competition, create awesome new products that bring your customers joy, and grow your market share and revenue bigger than ever. But how do you do that without undermining what your ecommerce team is already doing? The easy answer is to give them more resources, but providing more resources can get spendy and eliminate any long-term growth in profit you’re trying to achieve.
Your team might be pro at D2C, but not well-versed in advertising or social media. You might hire out an agency to take care of these elements of your brand instead. Most brands opt for this route to give themselves more air and expertise. While a good agency can free up time for ecommerce teams to nail down better a better strategy and get more creative, not all agencies are created equal. Agency costs can pile up quickly if you’re not careful. And if you choose a bad egg, suddenly the freed up time is now partially spent managing, communicating, and correcting the agency.
An agency can cost thousands of dollars every single month, and you might be paying that amount for several years based on what kind of contract you sign. That’s only for one agency. Think about how much you’ll be paying if you have to hire multiple agencies to cover different parts of your business. It’s quite a bit of change.
The bad news is that almost every other option for your business is either going to increase your costs or not free up the time your ecommerce team needs. You’ll either have to pour funds into training your team on different systems, platforms, and subjects to expand their expertise, which still doesn’t give them more time to get everything done, or you’ll need to hire more personnel, which will still cost you more.
If hiring is your solution, you’ll continue to find that your ecommerce team will need to expand faster than your profits grow in order to tap every new market and speciality. Any way you shake it, that sweet spot of growing your business, making a profit, and brand innovation is going to be hard to come by.
Your best bet to get there is a 3P partnership with Pattern.
How Pattern can help your team thrive, without added cost
At Pattern, we help you build an omni-channel powerhouse from the ground up so that you can save on costs, improve your brand equity, and become a more profitable business. One of the ways we do this is by breaking bad cycles and eliminating all of the pressure points that get in the way of your ecommerce team finding creative solutions for your business and doing the things they love.
We don’t require any monthly fees or costs, we just buy your inventory—no strings attached. Those piled up agency fees? Gone. Those stretched thin and stressed out ecommerce teams? Gone. Those ecommerce dumpster fires that there isn’t enough time in the day to douse? All of them are eliminated with a partnership with Pattern. We help you clean up your channels and listings, win big and save money on keyword advertising, build and maintain your brand presence across multiple marketplaces, control your pricing, and cover all of your shipping and packaging needs. We’re a bit like a one stop shop for ecommerce: We give you access to every tool you need to improve.
With your biggest ecommerce obstacles out of the way, your team has the space it needs to build sharper strategies for your brand and get creative on innovation. They can finally do what you hired them to do: Make your brand sing. Pattern provides the resources to help them do that, too.
Our Pattern Predict software helps us provide our brand partners with unique insights and data analysis about each corner of their business. We can show you which keywords you’ll find the most or least success on, what is and isn’t working with your marketing, where price erosion is happening on your products, how you can win the Buy Box on Amazon, how you can thrive on new marketplaces like Walmart, and how you can improve your product design based on what your customers are saying. We get you the data and the support, and your team gets you the strategy and the solutions.
At Pattern, we pay you first, not the other way around, and we help you save big on all those pesky fees and costs you’d typically spend for your ecommerce team. Your incentives are our incentives, and we’re stoked to make your brand’s potential a reality.
Reach out for a demo of our services and to learn more about what a potential Pattern partnership could look like with your brand.
