8 (Good) Problems Every Successful Ecommerce Business Has

As an e-commerce business owner, you know that success is always an uphill climb. There’s rarely a point when you can take your foot off the gas — but as you get more successful, your problems transform. In the beginning, you worried that every setback would be the one that put you out of business, but as you grow, you’ll start to get worried that you aren’t doing enough to capitalize on your growth. In other words, they’re good problems every successful e-commerce business has.

An order comes in, you pack it, you ship it. Ten orders come in, you pack them, you ship them, you treat yourself to a glass of wine with dinner. A hundred orders come in — what do you do? What about a thousand?

Fulfillment is one of the trickiest things to balance as an e-commerce owner because it’s one of the most important things to get right. Nothing makes a customer more upset than a delayed or incorrect order. However, at some point, you get so big you have to let go of some control – but hey, growing pains mean you’re growing, right?

There are a couple of points when you’re likely to face this issue. The first is when you transition from in-house to outsourcing your fulfillment. When your business becomes successful enough, it will no longer make sense to do it in-house, and instead, you’ll want to make the move to a third-party fulfillment company that can take care of fulfilling orders and shipping them for you. The second is when you outgrow your current fulfillment center and you need to look for one that can handle the increased demand, international shipping, kitting, or any other needs that aren’t being met. For both of these scenarios, you’ll want to use a checklist of questions to make sure that your prospective fulfillment center can handle your needs when you start hunting one down.

The upside is that now you’re a threat – the downside is that you’re going to have to start watching out for a variety of new ways your competition will be trying to steal away your customers. For example, it is against Google’s Terms of Service to use another company’s name in your ad, but that doesn’t mean that companies don’t try it anyway. If you were searching for an article with the best Nike shoes and an ad came up with the subject “Alternatives to Nike shoes,” that would be against the terms of service. And as you get more successful, other companies may try tactics like this on you.

Another big aggressive (and not legal, but still catastrophic) tactic that you can run into are fake reviews and other sabotage, especially on Amazon. Your competition can not only employ fake bad reviews to drag your product ratings down, they can also spam you with 5-star reviews to make it look like you’ve bought reviews, and shut your store down for violating their terms of service. Unfortunately there’s no easy solution for these tactics other than staying on top of them and reporting them when you see them.