Creating a solid Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) management strategy is an integral part of succeeding at eCommerce. Many users today expect a complete branded experience from when they see the product listing to when the product arrives on their doorstep. To fully create the best eCommerce customer experience, you need trusted eCommerce and Amazon business partners.

Here are some things Pattern ecommerce experts advise to improve your business strategy for eCommerce and simplify your D2C management.

I know this but . . . define D2C again.

From an Amazon business partner’s perspective, Direct-to-Consumer simply means selling goods directly to a consumer rather than through a retailer, wholesaler, distributor, or other middleman. As Amazon eCommerce experts, we’ve noticed the advantages of this approach include:

• Increasing brand equity by building a relationship with your consumer (that will drive them to purchase from you more than once).
• Aggregating more data about the consumer.
• Complete control over your brand experience from start to finish.

Challenges with D2C

It’s not easy to master this strategy. For example, rather than shipping product by the pallet-load, you have to figure out how to get individual items wrapped and shipped (and arrive quickly) to improve the customer’s experience. This is a common challenge D2C brands face on Amazon.

Nicola Hollow, Pattern’s General U.K. Manager, said the biggest challenge D2C brands face is making themselves commercially viable. “There are lots of costs associated with D2C in terms of shipping product and getting the logistics and the operations right to support the sales process, especially for brands who have products that are potentially heavier and larger, which are harder to get to the end client,” Hollow said.

Common D2C challenges include:

• Finding a cost efficient shipping strategy.
• Product packaging and logistics.

What makes a good D2C strategy anyway?

At Pattern, we have a variety of experts on board who help our partners create successful D2C strategies. Lara Jelowicki, our International Director, said one of the key components to a successful direct-to-consumer offering is making sure it’s individualized and tailored to the brand’s business model. Good D2C strategies include:

• Individualized considerations on the brand’s business model (whether it be pure play, wholesale, or franchising).
• Identifying and expanding to commercial channels that brands should be operating on (marketplaces or direct-to-consumer websites).
• Leveraging other partners to grow online sales.

Crucial to a good D2C strategy is developing a roadmap for growth, said Stacey Hyland, Pattern’s Australia/New Zealand Director. The roadmap for growth does several key things for brands:

• It identifies how to get more traffic to a direct-to-consumer proposition.
• It examines how to improve customer experience in terms of driving incremental conversion rate improvements.
• Then, once there’s more traffic to a website and better conversion, it determines whether that business is really set up to scale in terms of the people and the structure of the business, its processes, and platform.

“Because the last thing you want to do when you put more into the funnel is not be able to deliver on that promise,” Hyland said. “You want to deliver a customer experience that people are going to come back for time and time again.” In the end, a successful D2C management strategy looks at how each small thing will affect the bigger picture. “We find really looking at the whole customer journey and refining it can really add a lot of value in helping customers convert faster and better,” Hollow said.