While the e-commerce industry is on a continual uptick, it’s becoming difficult for businesses to succeed. With increased competition for consumer attention, scaling a WooCommerce store is easier said than done.
However, there are businesses out there that have cracked the code and in this post, we’re going to share some lessons from high-growth brands featured on The Entourage.
How to scale your WooCommerce store
High-growth businesses have a few things in common that help them succeed. Here are some of them we’ve noted over the years despite market changes:
1. Build Scalable Systems
When you start an online store, think about how you will handle the smallest of operations. This includes transactions, customer interactions, shipping and other aspects, and that’s where building out repeatable systems comes into play.
- Invest in automation - From inventory management, order processing, customer communication, customer support and other functions, use WooCommerce plugins to automate it all. This helps save on time, effort and reduce errors on routine tasks, giving you more resources to focus on other growth initiatives. 77% of businesses that use marketing automation see an increase in conversion rates.
- Develop a scalable infrastructure - While WooCommerce is a scalable CMS, you also want to ensure your hosting and other elements of the technology stack offer the same flexibility.
- Set up a CRM - As your store grows, it becomes important to manage customer interactions across channels. A good CRM can help segment your customers, track their behavior, understand their preferences and personalize marketing efforts that lead to scaling your brand.
2. Optimize Operations for Efficiency
High-growth businesses are always focused on optimizing their operations. This helps them to maximize the ROI on the resources available to them and here’s what they focus on first:
- Streamline your supply chain - The very first thing you need to optimize is preventing stock outs, reducing holding costs and improving your delivery times. Use an inventory management tool that provides real-time insights into stock levels, helps track shipments and can automate your reorders.
- Enhance user experience - Focus on optimizing customer experience on your WooCommerce store. This includes your loading time, ease of navigation and the checkout process.
- Monitor performance: Use e-commerce analytics tools to track how well your store is performing in real-time. Keeping watch on metrics such as conversion rates, average order value, customer acquisition cost, best-performing products and channels, and more can help keep your growth strategies agile.
3. Leverage Technology to Support Growth
Technology is a powerful growth enabler. Here’s how high-growth businesses use technology to stay ahead:
- Utilize data analytics - Analyze data from across all customer touchpoints - website, social media, marketing and sales channels. This can help make your product offerings, marketing strategies and promotions more data-driven, reducing resource burn in competitive markets.
- Embrace interactive technology - While we don’t recommend implementing every trend, we do encourage making the most of advanced technologies. In e-commerce, this currently includes AR, VR, AI and GenAI. But keep your focus on using these technologies to enhance customer experience.
- Integrated technology stacks - As you start to scale your WooCommerce store, ensure the technologies you leverage are well integrated. This ensures that all your data moves easily across departments, helping get an overview of how the business is performing and optimizing it for faster scale.
4. Set up omnichannel marketing and sales
Setting up three or more channels for a campaign has helped e-commerce businesses drive 287% higher purchase rate than single-channel campaigns. And high-growth businesses have this in common!
- Integrate platforms - Identify the key channels and platforms your audience is active on and connect your WooCommerce store to them. This will help ensure your product catalog remains up-to-date across channels, delivering a seamless experience for shoppers.
- Cross-channel promotions - Ensure that you have connected campaigns across channels to drive traffic between them. For example, promoting social media discounts on your website or asking your email subscribers to opt in for SMS to receive special offers.
- Consistent Branding - High-growth businesses ensure that they maintain uniform branding across channels. Whether organic or paid campaigns, their efforts are focused on keeping the core message aligned with the overall vision. This helps build better brand recall which boosts retention and drives more sales.
Conclusion
The commerce industry is becoming more competitive by the day. If you want to scale your WooCommerce store, you need to build scalable systems that help you optimize operations and leverage technology to enable business growth.
While learning from other successful businesses can inspire the strategies you implement, we recommend experimenting and continually monitoring what works for you better. Every business has its own unique value proposition and the strategies you choose should highlight those!
