Who Do I Need For E-Commerce?
Many small business owners quite rightly ask who they need to run their online shop and if they will need staff to assist with their e-commerce project. In a sense it’s one of those “how long is a piece of string?” questions. When it comes to e-commerce it is up to the business owner how far the project will be taken and what staff, if any, he/she decided to assign.
I know of many small businesses where the business owner themselves are totally responsibe for all aspects of their online shop. This is perfectly possible, even from home in the evenings, as many small businesses do. Once the initial work of setting up your e-commerce shop website is complete there is a small set of tasks that will need to be done, either by you or a member of staff. These include:
- Adding, removing and altering products and information to your e-commerce store
- Preparing images for products
- Checking and processing customer orders
- Responding to customer questions
- Processing payments for online orders
- Packaging and dispatching customer orders
- Marketing of your online shop
- E-Commerce site administration such as revenue, visitor stats, etc
It is perfectly possible to run your e-commerce store without staff
Set Some Time Aside To Run Your E-Commerce Shop
Whether it be adding products, images, processing orders, doing some online promotion or responding to customer queries, these activities all take time so remember to assign time to accomplish them. This is especially important if you are tackling online trading alone. All the tasks in the list above will have to be done sooner or later but if you begin to see your e-commerce shop as a hindrence and not an opportunity then you may be on the road to failure. Your online shop is an important as your real shop.
E-Commerce Staff Considerations
In an ideal world you would have someone to assist you with the running of your online shop. Even one person can make a world of difference, taking a major workload off your shoulders and speeding up the progress of your e-commerce project. Consider hiring someone with the basic skills your online shop will require:
- Basic computer and typing skills with good English
- Experience of resizing and changing images with photo-editing software
- The patience to take their time and enter details correctly
Even more progress on your e-commerce project could be made if:
- The person has experience of e-commerce software or similar software packages
- They have experience of content re-writing (in their own words) and/or blog/product review writing
- They have experience of internet marketing and an understanding of search engines
A single employee could have their day divided into sections, making leaps and bounds with your online shop. This makes your progress easier to track and provides variety in their work. For example, their timetable could consist of:
- The first and last hour of every day could be spent checking orders and responding to customers
- Mornings Mon-Thurs could be spent preparing product images for entry
- Afternoons Mon-Thurs could be spent entering product details, prices, descriptions and images
- Friday could be spent promoting the site, building links and witing blog entries
Which ever way you structure your day or the time of your employees, developing a system is the most productive way to make progress with your e-commerce venture.
