Starting an ecommerce business is only the beginning of your adventure as an online entrepreneur. With the market being as competitive as it is today, you also have to be meticulous with how you run your online store in order to stay competitive.
Cutting costs and keeping your overheads at a minimum are among the ways you can be more competitive on the market. One of the things you can do to manage your costs is outsource certain workflows to service providers. Here are three things you can outsource immediately.
IT Support
Even as an ecommerce business, you don’t have to have a large IT department. In fact, you can make do with a small and lean team of web developers or engineers and let a third-party IT support service provider help you with everything else.
Rather than worrying about maintaining your own business phone system and other IT infrastructure, for instance, you can turn to 24x7it.com, a leading name in managed IT services, for some ready-made service packages. This offloads the burden of maintaining a robust IT system altogether.
Working with a company like 24×7 IT Solutions also helps you stay lean as the company grows. You don’t have to worry about scaling up your entire IT infrastructure to support the company’s growth. Everything will be handled for you at a low (and manageable) cost.
Accounting
Another workflow you can completely outsource is financial management, particularly accounting and bookkeeping. There are many business solutions designed to tackle the challenges of keeping detailed accounts, so you don’t have to have several in-house accountants for the job.
You need to begin the process of outsourcing accounting by deciding on a system to use. Depending on whether you use cash-based accounting or accrual-based accounting, you can choose the most suitable managed accounting service for your business.
On top of that, there are service providers that combine accounting services with add-ons such as reporting, financial management, and risk management. Combined with the ability to integrate the other business solutions you use, outsourcing accounting is a great way to save money.
Shipping
Few ecommerce businesses actually handle shipping in-house. You may already partner with shipping companies for your ecommerce business, but that doesn’t mean you cannot outsource some of the shipping-related workflows even further.
Handling, for instance, can be outsourced to sorting centers. This means order fulfillment is no longer a task that you need to handle manually. Some sorting centers will even go as far as helping you manage inventory and automating other parts of the business.
With handling and shipping out of the way, you can focus on what really matters: delivering products to customers quickly and effectively.
You can do all of these things without spending a lot of money in the process. In fact, you can outsource these workflows to reduce costs and be more efficient as an ecommerce business. That’s how you gain a competitive advantage in a tight market.
