To say ecommerce is a big opportunity for brands is an understatement. Ecommerce is on pace to do $6 trillion in sales in 2024, and $7 trillion by 2025. Not only is is the global indstury growing, currently about 18% of all retail sales in the U.S. go through ecommerce, making the local industry just as appealing.
But thriving on ecommerce isn’t as simple as it seems—and not nearly simple enough for a small ecommerce team to handle on its own. Even if your team can handle your direct-to-consumer website, it quickly becomes a mammoth task to successfully expand to additional marketplaces, languages, and countries.
The tasks of handling shipping and returns, managing website plugins and marketplace platforms, maintaining high-quality listings, ensuring consistent prices across channels, and preserving your brand image quickly become complicated and overwhelming. Your ecommerce team is likely left to wonder where and how to best spend their limited time and resources.
At Pattern, we believe brands can more simply and easily attain ecommerce success by focusing on five core competencies: insights, traffic, conversion, price, and logistics. We’ve found that as brands focus their efforts on excelling in these competencies, they drive profitable, tangible growth for their companies.
To simplify this process for as many brands as possible, we’ve carefully crafted an ecommerce acceleration platform to help brands master the competencies and harness their full ecommerce potential. This platform includes software built around each key competency layered with expert services. The best part? We don’t charge for this platform.
Read on to learn Pattern’s role as an accelerator and take a deep dive into each core competency.
What is an ecommerce accelerator?
In the last year, ecommerce has seen the rise of ecommerce aggregators. Aggregators buy Amazon businesses and sellers, either to continue selling the products on their own or to eventually sell the companies for a profit. Thrasio is the leader of this movement.
At Pattern, we consider ourselves ecommerce accelerators. Unlike aggregators, we’re not here to buy your business and make a profit on it. We’re here to help you accelerate your own brand’s sales and growth. And we’re the first ecommerce accelerator with a dedicated acceleration platform to make that process as effective as possible.
Our acceleration results speak for themselves. Pattern partner Pure Encapsulations has seen a sales growth of 513% over 4 years of working with Pattern. Pandora Jewelry’s growth has accelerated by 300%. Owlet has seen 300% revenue growth and decreased unauthorized sellers with 95% compliance. Simply put, we specialize in accelerating brands like yours.
The five core competencies of acceleration
Our acceleration platform is built on five core competencies that, when mastered, accelerate brands into ecommerce success.
Insights
Insights refers to monitoring data about your brand’s performance on ecommerce. This includes data about your brand’s revenue, market share, traffic, ad results, customer satisfaction, and more. It’s crucial to accurately track this data in real-time to know what’s working well for your brand and where you need to improve. Doing so will help you anticipate consumer needs based on historical activity, spot information disconnects from abandoned carts and high bounce rates, and learn about your target audience.
Although it sounds like a given to know, for example, your brand’s revenue across channels, it’s not uncommon for brands to lose visibility when selling on multiple channels. If your brand sells product to a distributor who then sells your product on Amazon, you may quickly begin to lose track of your data. The distributor may be selling some of your product on Amazon, some in a brick-and-mortar store, and some on other ecommerce marketplaces.
At Pattern, we know how frustrating this can be. Our software gives brands access to all the data available about their products and brand, making it clear and easy to know where your brand is thriving, how you’re faring against your competitors, and where you can make improvements to maximize profit.
Apart from tracking your brand’s metrics, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of the entire market in which you compete. To truly dominate the insights core competency, you must also have a real-time understanding of category and competitive trends. Our proprietary software makes this simple.
Traffic
It’s impossible to make sales if you’re not getting traffic on your listings, which makes traffic the second core competency brands should prioritize. This includes maximizing your paid advertising and unpaid SEO opportunities to improve your search rank.
Paid advertising gives your leads visibility and helps you rank in the keywords that are most frequently searched by your target audience. Utilizing best SEO practices is a free way to boost your organic search rank, which in turn creates a growth loop—as your product ranks higher, it receives more traffic, and as it receives more traffic, algorithms will see it as popular and increase or maintain its high organic rank.
Your marketplace coverage is another aspect to consider. If you want to drive more traffic to your product listings, you may consider expanding to additional marketplaces like Walmart, Tmall, and Mercado Libre.
With Pattern’s ecommerce acceleration platform, we increase your brand’s traffic by automating advertising, optimizing product listings for SEO, and increasing your return on ad spend.
Conversion
Once you’ve driven traffic to your listing, the next step is to convert that traffic into purchases. Creating a stellar product listing page is one of the most effective ways to turn browsing shoppers into customers. High quality content, detailed product descriptions, and consistent branding can all increase your brand’s conversion rates.
A good rule of thumb is to maximize every possible opportunity for high-quality content. Fill every image slot in your stack with professional, lifestyle-led photos. Utilize tools like A+ content, listing video, and sponsored brand video. Fill your product descriptions with simple, optimized content that answers common consumer questions. Do everything you can to improve customer experience to generate a high rating and positive reviews.
When discussing conversion, it’s also important to take a look at your brand’s competitiveness, starting with your product price, which we’ll discuss further below. Tools like coupons, bundles, and rebates can also push consumers to click “add to cart.”
Significant channel conflict can negatively influence your conversion rates. Is your product being sold across different marketplaces for different prices? Do you have more than a handful of vendors selling your product on each marketplace? Do you struggle with product compliance in terms of imagery and inventory? Are your images inconsistent across marketplaces? If you answered yes to any of those questions, your brand is at risk for channel conflict and the resulting hit to your conversion rates.
Our Predict software, alongside the expertise of highly-qualified marketing professionals, will help your brand boost conversion by optimizing content, building brand credibility, and maintaining omnichannel brand consistency.
Price
It takes significant market research and financial analysis to price your product both competitively and profitably.
Once you’ve set the ideal price for your product, you need to maintain a consistent price for your product across all sellers and marketplaces. Tracking and enforcing Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) can make the difference between sustainment and acceleration. A key element of this process is removing unauthorized sellers, who often sell your product for below MAP and thus pressure other sellers to do the same.
Stabilizing pricing, both through eliminating unauthorized sellers and keeping prices consistent over time, will help your brand win the Buy Box more consistently, giving you more conversions and more profit.
Pattern’s ecommerce acceleration platform can help your brand consistently win the Buy Box, decrease MAP violators, and stabilize pricing.
Logistics
The final core competency brands need to master to achieve ecommerce acceleration is logistics. When it comes to logistics, brands should aim to be efficient with fulfillment, returns, forecasting, and managing other third party sellers.
Relying on an exclusive seller is a solid strategy to help you more efficiently manage your logistics. Exclusive sellers often allow you to ship your product much more quickly than you would be able to on your own, helping you compete with other products with lightning fast shipping. This model can also help brands with limited warehouse space.
Customer support and experience also fall under the logistics umbrella. When you quickly respond to customer inquiries and make returns quick and painless, you’re likely to enjoy better loyalty and retention, more positive ratings and reviews, and an improved brand reputation.
Pattern’s acceleration framework ensures your product will always be in stock, helps you expand your fulfillment capabilities, and reduces your shipping costs. While we help brands master the first four competencies with a software called Predict, we rely on a warehouse management software called Shelf for logistics and distribution. Predict also facilitates and manages cross-docking—after receiving a product shipment, we relabel and package every product before sending it to one of Amazon’s 106 different facilities.
How will your brand accelerate?
Working with Pattern is like clicking the “easy” button for ecommerce. Our software and expert services fill the gaps that short-staffed ecommerce teams can’t quite reach, helping you maximize your potential (and profit) on ecommerce. Our ecommerce acceleration platform is the first of its kind, and your brand can access it at no extra cost to you. Interested in learning more? Get your demo today to get started.
