eCommerce consultants can make a difference for your online business if you’ve hit a plateau, if you’re finding it difficult to hit your sales target, or if you’re simply having trouble getting it off the ground. But before you go spending your hard-earned cash on hiring one, check out these 5 FAQs about eCommerce consultants!
Q: What can eCommerce consultants do for me?
A: eCommerce consultants are typically able to offer personal experience and expert knowledge from their own success cases. They can help you optimize your marketing strategy, conversion funnel, and user experience strategy, among other things. eCommerce consultants can work for you full-time, or on a contract basis.
Q: What are some advantages of hiring an eCommerce consultant?
A: There are at least three benefits to hiring an eCommerce consultant: (1) they can offer unbiased feedback as an outsider to your team; (2) they help you save time by taking care of things outside of your area of expertise so that you can focus on what you’re really good at; (3) they can actually save you time and money because they usually work on a contract basis, this means that you won’t have to worry about overhead and costs associated with training, supervising or retaining them.
Q: What kind of questions should I ask eCommerce consultants?
A: You should at least ask four questions of any eCommerce consultant: (1) What type of knowledge do you have? Is it B2C, B2B, SaaS, or open-source platforms? Different types of eCommerce knowledge can bring different advantages, as well as drawbacks; (2) How do you collaborate with your clients? Do they work well together with the existing team or do they tend to work in isolation? Non-team players could take a business down an unintended path; (3) What is your work process? It’s important to know their strategy beforehand to avoid dashed expectations; (4) How do you measure your success? It helps if they are able to quantify the results that they hope to achieve within a certain time frame.
Q: How can eCommerce consultants help with advertising/marketing campaigns?
A: eCommerce consultants with the relevant expertise can help you launch and run your ads on search engines and/or social media platforms. They can help you monitor your ad performance and make adjustments necessary to your overall marketing strategy. While they could get hands-on in managing ad campaigns, the value of eCommerce consultants could also be demonstrated by their ability to create additional revenue funnels and remarketing strategies to help you capitalize on existing clientele.
Q: Can eCommerce consultants help with business development?
A: Absolutely. Qualified eCommerce consultants bring to the table a wealth of experience that extends beyond the online aspect of the business. They should be able to look at your current product offerings and identify any improvements that you could and/or should make. They can work with suppliers to get better deals, improved products, better delivery schedules. Since logistics is more often than not the key to the rise and fall of an online business, eCommerce consultants could be of great service to you in optimizing your product source.
