ca. 30 Minuten
nach Wunsch auch mit Videocall“What actually saves an online retailer’s butt“* – with these words, Olaf Grüger titles his iBusiness article published on April 17th*. Someone, finally, who doesn’t advise the often propagated low hanging fruits, the next big thing that only needs to be identified and grasped at. Word! Grügers colleague Joachim Graf puts it in a nutshell in the second part of the article: “There simply is no shortcut to success in eCommerce”**. The one who wants to be competitive needs actual fine-tuning. And that mostly is as laborious as tricky.
An online retailer’s handcraft: continual fine-tuning
Besides the continuous re-adjusting of (even technical) web shop functionalities, Grüger especially highlights the data-driven optimization of business processes – whether it be dynamic pricing or the right budget allocation in online marketing. And of course he is right: The competition is too hard for simple tricks, what online retailers need is data. Once more, everything boils down to the well-known triad measure – analyze – optimize. The good news: there’s help! Nowadays, no one needs to laboriously type numbers in a manually created Excel table anymore to tinker a preferably colorful monthly reporting for his executive (not the poor intern neither). Nowadays, online retailers can automate these processes to save valuable working hours. And, most of all, to cover their employees’ backs for the more important things: the interpretation of analyses and reports as well as the deduction of adequate action recommendations.
„Web shops are run by employees who on a daily basis take numerous decisions that make a direct impact on success. […] Two minutes of automated routine work per day allow every employee to use a whole additional working day per year to the benefit of profitable work.”*
Just start projecting the time (and money) a retailer could save by automating his reporting – the monthly one as well as the weekly and the daily. Give me the tool that is capable of that!
Every decision has an impact on success – or has not
But not only in regard to time and money savings by means of automation, the Grüger quote indicates key factors to success that are crucial for survival or downfall of a shop. Retailers also need to take the first part of the quote into account: Each of the multiple decisions taken by employees from every department on a daily basis has a direct impact on business success. How wonderful it would be if buyers, the marketing manager, the controller as well as the logistics department were able to take data-driven decisions! Decisions that do have rhyme and reason regarding their profitability, because they all originate from the same, valid, holistic database.
Decide data-driven: supported by an automated reporting
And here we are exactly at what minubo offers: a holistic database (integrated from shop/ERP, web analytics, marketing costs and cash system) with an automated reporting for all business areas as well as numerous possibilities for fast (!) and simple (!) detail analyses down to the level of the single customer, product and order. Simply log in, have a look at your daily updated reports, modify, drill-down, filter and extend them at the click of a mouse, draw conclusions and, most important, take data-driven decisions. Campaign A records numerous orders but a poor gross margin? Terminate it! Adword XY shows extraordinary high margins, but generates a poor revenue because of a low allocated budget? Invest more! First-time purchasers from September have re-ordered faster and more frequently, because they were provided with the right newsletter recommendations? Embrace, extend and repeat the implemented marketing activities! And never forget: always keep on measuring, analyzing and re-adjusting. Business changes too quickly to rely on temporary success. But fortunately, there are solutions that help.
An ancient conclusion: no pain, no gain
Sure, success cannot be guaranteed with data-driven fine-tuning either, as Joachim Graf highlights, too, but “without data-driven fine-tuning, success in eCommerce nowadays as well as in future will no longer be possible”**. His harsh, but surely realistic conclusion: in the upcoming months and years, the online retail market is going to shrink significantly – because everybody who is not ready to measure, analyze and optimize over and over again, in short: to perform most detailed work, cannot exist on the highly competitive market anymore. “There is no Next big Thing that quickly makes the retailer rich. Just hard work.”**
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*Olaf Grüger: Was Onlinehändlern in Zukunft wirklich den Arsch rettet. iBusiness, 17.03.2014
**Joachim Graf: Es gibt einfach keine Abkürzung zum ECommerce-Erfolg. iBusiness, 17.03.2014
