Building a successful e-commerce brand in the age of Amazon

If you’re interested in building an e-commerce business in 2024, there’s no avoiding the 500lb gorilla in the room: Amazon. Whether you want to or not, you’ll need to compete with them for a share of almost any market segment you target. The problem is that competing with them in scale, reach, and resources is impossible. So, if you want to stand a chance of succeeding, you need to learn how to do more with less.

Fortunately, there’s a guiding principle you can adhere to that will point the way toward the right strategy. It’s that your customers won’t care how you deliver their desired products and experience—they only care that you do. You don’t need massive warehouses, thousands of customer service reps, or your own logistics business. Instead, you can make strategic investments to mimic those capabilities in other ways. Here’s where to start and a few areas to target as you get your e-commerce venture off the ground.

Deliberately design your brand around your niche

The first thing you will need to do is to figure out how you want to brand your e-commerce site. Once you select a niche, you can work backward to design your brand around it. As you do, remember that your brand is the first thing any potential customer will see. Therefore, you need it to communicate your value proposition in a language your target audience understands. To strike the right note, it’s a good idea to research branding trends and see if any overlap with your target audience. You can always evolve your brand later as customer tastes change.

Begin with a flawless shopping experience

One of Amazon’s most significant weaknesses is that it tries to be all things to all people. As a result, the shopping experience on the platform is hit-or-miss, depending on the product you’re looking for. Additionally, they let 3rd-party sellers pay for sponsored placement, making shoppers’ searches an often frustrating experience.

As an e-commerce startup, you don’t have to try and sell every kind of product. So, you can spend the time and money necessary to refine the shopping experience for your niche. Using an e-commerce-focused website builder to create your initial site is OK. It will save you money you can then spend on thoroughly testing the shopping experience. Focus-group usability testing is essential and will let you hone that experience to perfection.

You should also pay careful attention to your site’s checkout process flow. That’s one of the common weaknesses that tends to doom e-commerce startups. Focus on eliminating as many purchase barriers as possible. You want customers to go from adding a product to their cart to completing their purchase as quickly as possible.

Finally, you must provide a post-sale experience that’s at least as good as what Amazon offers. That begins with timely shipping notifications and allowing customers to track product deliveries. Fortunately, multiple shipping software platforms let you add that functionality without building the infrastructure and spending a fortune.

(Image credit) Go all-in on customer service automation

Your customer service operation will be the second-most important element of your business’s customer experience. However, you won’t launch your business with a large customer service staff unless you’re working with a deep-pocketed angel investor. The good news is that your customers don’t have to know that. To ensure they don’t, you should go all-in on automation to deliver an excellent customer service experience.

Start by deploying front-line customer service chatbots to weed out and satisfy simple customer inquiries. You can back that up with an automated customer service email system to ensure quick first response times for all queries. Then, consider contact center outsourcing to offer live agents to customers requiring more complex assistance. As long as you can resolve customer issues without long wait times, the scale of your operation will be indistinguishable from that of Amazon. The critical difference is that your operation will be orders of magnitude cheaper.

Don’t skimp on marketing

Although you’ll need to keep a tight lid on spending as you launch your business, be sure not to let that extend to your marketing efforts. As a rule of thumb, you should expect to spend at least 30% of your projected revenue on customer acquisition. As a niche retailer, you must lean heavily into building word-of-mouth momentum. That means creating an organic social presence and connecting with thought leaders in your niche. Doing that will turn your earliest customers into evangelists for your brand.

It is also a good idea to try and infuse all of your marketing efforts with data-driven insight. For example, you can use predictive marketing tactics to capitalize on anticipated customer behaviors. That’s one of the ways Amazon got to its position atop the global e-commerce market. And they’ve even turned their expertise into a product you can use to grow your business. It’s called Amazon Personalize, and you can use it to build a product recommendation engine that rivals the original. You can even plug it into your marketing processes to create personalized emails, social posts, and other customer-specific marketing materials.

Leverage freelancers for necessary skills

Finally, it is vital to embrace the importance of expertise early on in your e-commerce business journey. It’s self-defeating to try and do everything yourself; typically, it only ends in a costly lesson in futility. No matter your experience level, you will require subject matter experts in several disciplines to help you. The best way to acquire that help is by leveraging freelancers. You can even turn over entire processes to freelancers via knowledge process outsourcing. It’s an excellent way to get critical business processes up and running while avoiding the typical pitfalls new businesses often encounter. Plus, it will help you minimize costs while you do it.

Don’t try to be the next Amazon

Above all else, you should try to avoid the temptation to try and turn your business into the next Amazon. Recent history has no shortage of startups that tried to do that and failed. After all, there’s a reason that only large companies like Walmart, Target, and Rakuten have managed to go toe-to-toe with them and survive.

That isn’t to say that you should give up on growth. If you take a slow and steady approach and learn from your successes and failures, your e-commerce business will grow. And in the long term, you’ll have built a solid brand that may one day lay claim to the e-commerce crown, even if that day’s not today.

Featured image credit: Kenny Eliason/Unsplash