Reaping a million dollars in revenue is a dream that most e-commerce businesses have. But it’s important to realize that higher sales come with even bigger challenges.
Once you hit the million-dollar revenue level in your e-commerce business…
You know you’ve achieved a level of success that many other business owners can only dream of.
But that also means you’d be facing many battles that not a lot of people have won.
See, this type of success calls for changes in how you handle your e-commerce business.
There would be challenges with scalability and logistics… as you deal with bigger fish in the market. You’d also need to think about growing customer demand… while managing increasing inventory numbers. All while coming head-to-head with bigger, stronger competition.
But don’t worry. All hope is not lost for a seamless experience while scaling your business.
Upgrading to Shopify Plus can help you tremendously in solving these problems. The platform offers unique and convenient solutions that make it easy to scale your e-commerce brand.
So, in this article, we’ll talk about some of the biggest challenges you need to overcome while scaling your e-commerce brand… and how Shopify Plus can help.
5 Most Common Scalability Challenges
#1: Website Crashes
As your e-commerce brand expands, more and more people will visit your website. Unfortunately, higher internet traffic can cause your site to slow down exponentially. And since people want a speedy, dependable website… you’d find it difficult to turn visitors into customers if your site is crashing all the time.
That’s why your website must be efficient enough to accommodate enormous amounts of customers… especially during peak periods such as promotions and holidays.
#2: Growing Inventory and Demand Fulfillment
With your brand becoming more popular, you would need to handle increasing orders.
If you are constantly ‘sold out,’ or if delivery takes considerably longer than your rivals’, you will lose clients and struggle to expand your shop.
Being able to keep up with demand is vital, especially during peak months, where you’ll earn a majority of your revenue.
As such, you must meet increased demand through better inventory and fulfilment management systems.
#3: Customer Service and User Experience
Customer service may be easy to manage on a small scale. But it becomes increasingly more complex as your e-commerce business grows.
See, building a loyal customer base requires you to be highly responsive to all customer service requests. Also, your customers should be able to reach you through accessible channels.
Remember: excellent customer service is key to expanding your business.
#4: Cybersecurity
E-commerce companies face serious threats from cyberattacks and data theft.
This means you need to double down on protecting your customers’ private and sensitive information. Any technical issues resulting in a security breach might ruin your company or drive away clients.
#5: Global Competition
Every single company competes for the interest of potential clients.
So, to grow, It’s essential to differentiate your brand from other competitors within your niche or industry.
5 Shopify Plus Features that Can Help
Here are 5 Shopify Plus features that can help you overcome the challenges we’ve listed above:
#1: Cloud-based Infrastructure
The cloud-based infrastructure used by Shopify Plus is powered by a cluster of Shopify-owned servers.
These servers ensure that the site is capable of serving more than 600,000 merchants… with up to 80,000 requests per second.
And to maintain optimum performance, the Shopify Plus team assesses critical parts of the platform… and it conducts thorough load testing and manual system upgrades.
The result is 99.99% uptime on servers that can process thousands of transactions per minute. That means your website will experience virtually zero crashes… so you don’t lose sales even in times of high demand.
#2: CMS and OMS
As high-growth merchants start using Shopify Plus, the platform’s out-of-the-box Content Management System (CMS) and Order Management System (OMS) capabilities provide a solid foundation to get started.
Now, what if a merchant wants to go beyond those basic foundations? Well, Shopify Plus finds the best developers and partners in the world, builds a community around them, and incentivizes them to grow and build their business on the Shopify platform.
This allows you access to the same backend technologies that Fortune 500 companies use.
These include third-party logistics, inventory management systems, order management systems, product information management, warehouse management software, and enterprise resource planning.
By utilizing these features, handling inventory will never be a problem… no matter how big your brand becomes.
#3: Shopify Flow (Automation)
There will always be menial tasks connected to running a successful e-commerce brand.
Before, you needed to do these yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. But because of Shopify Flow, you can automate all these tasks so you can save yourself time and money.
Shopify flow can do the following:
- Track and reward top customers
- Tag and segment customers from campaigns
- Organize products for visual merchandising and search
- Hide, pause, and republish products based on availability
- Automate inventory management and reordering
- Notify customer service of new draft orders
- Expedite shipping notifications for your logistics team
- Flag, halt, review, or cancel high-risk orders
#4: Gold-Standard Security
With Shopify Plus, your website is hosted and secured through Level 1 PCI DSS compliance. That’s the gold standard for validating the security standards of organizations that process online payments.
Shopify Plus also handles various compliance assessments and risk management to ensure your website is secure without the need to assess your website regularly.
Most e-commerce websites use SSL encryption technology and HTTPS protocol to protect the buyer’s personal information only during checkout. On the other hand, Shopify covers the entire shopping experience, from the storefront to the administrative side.
This ensures that you and your customers remain safe from any cyber threat.
#5: International Operation
Shopify Plus is designed to work in a global market — hosting 20 languages and 133 local currencies.
This enables you to fully customize the experience for local shoppers. For starters, you may set international prices so customers can select local payment methods available in their location.
As a result, you can reach more customers worldwide, and increase profits exponentially.
Shopify Plus also speeds up fulfilment by offering merchants a world-class content delivery network (CDN) powered by Fastly… at no additional charge.
Make the Switch to Shopify Plus
As you already know, expanding your e-commerce business comes with unique challenges.
But now you also know that Shopify Plus can give convenient solutions for these problems. From task automation all the way to website development and maintenance, this platform has it all.
So if you’re looking to upgrade to Shopify Plus, GMS is here to help.
If you want to learn more, feel free to schedule a free consult with one of our GMS experts.
