Maximizing ROI with Strategic eCommerce Investment

Effective eCommerce business management is all about maximizing your return on investment (ROI). Getting more from your eCommerce investment is particularly important today, as a 2020 Statista survey found that 88% of all eCommerce executives ranked their competition as “tough” or “very tough.”

Squeezing extra productivity from your eCommerce investments can help you leapfrog the competition and lead a more resilient business. Creating a high-performance eCommerce team and boosting your eCommerce ROI can support other areas of your business. This is crucial if, like William Henry or Norwalk Furniture, you operate a brick-and-mortar store in addition to your eCommerce store. 

By maximizing your online retail investment, you can protect your business against seasonal fluctuations, boost your revenue, and improve your brand reputation. Making a strategic eCommerce investment can improve your awareness of market trends, too, as social listening tools can alert you to sudden changes in the industry. 

Business Impact Analysis

Before you start spending cash on a new site or a set of premium digital tools, consider conducting a thorough business impact analysis (BIA) first. A thorough BIA boosts resilience by helping you understand your firm’s vulnerabilities. A BIA also gives you a deeper appreciation of your business’s critical functions and will maximize your eCommerce profitability later on. You can conduct a BIA today by doing the following:

• Determine the scope of your BIA and focusing on a few key departments;
• Identify all of the critical functions that serve your eCommerce store;
• Interview department leads to determine dependencies and identify continuity risks;
• Assess the impact of disruptions (including brand damage, downtime, and customer impact);
• Set recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives to streamline your comeback following a disruption. 

Completing a thorough BIA ensures that online retail investment remains lucrative even when unexpected events occur. Securing business continuity is crucial if you want to maximize your ROI with strategic eCommerce investments that are designed to reduce costs, boost revenue, and increase your brand exposure. 

Properly planning for emergencies can protect your cash flow, too. This is crucial if you want to keep your head above water in the long term, as sudden changes — like the Supreme Court decision to allow states to seek sales tax from out-of-state online sellers — can eat into your profits and pose a real risk to your profitability. By foregrounding continuity threats during the planning phase, you can weather any storm that comes your way and protect your profits when facing headwinds. 

eCommerce Investments with a High ROI

Leveraging an eCommerce site successfully can meaningfully bolster your revenue and dramatically increase your sales volume. However, if you want your eCommerce site to support your long-term business vision, you’ll need to utilize eCommerce technologies that drive traffic to your site and increase your conversion rate. 

Successfully leveraging technology can aid your efforts to create a high-performance team, too, as folks need access to emerging tech to plan strategically, strengthen your USP, and improve the user experience. If you’re unsure of your next steps, consider following in the footsteps of major brands. 

Nest

Nest Fragrance recently integrated Shopify into its existing eCommerce presence with the help of Trellis. Redesigning the site on Shopify with tools like Celigo and Blue Cherry gave Nest a foundational infrastructure that can be easily customized. This resulted in:

• 304% increase in revenue;
• 68% higher conversion rates;
• 51% reduction in bounce rate.

These changes coincided with a rebrand that empowered Nest Fragrance’s transformation into NEST New York and led to a bump in revenue and conversions. 

TB12 Sports

Tom Brady may have switched shoulder pads and pig skin for sharp suits and commentary booths, but his brand still needs a great site to deliver a blend of training, nutrition, sports equipment, and high-quality content for consumers. 

Tools like Celigo improved integrations on TB12 Sports and resulted in greatly reduced loading times, improved site stability, and new functionalities that improved UX and led to eCommerce cost savings. Additional benefits included: 

• 49% increase in revenue;
• Bounce rate reduced by 10%;
• Conversion rate increased by 73%.

These changes integrated seamlessly with TB12’s modern headless architecture and the various systems that the business employed on its site. 

Using tools like Celigo, Blue Cherry, and ERPs like Lux Bond Green’s BigCommerce can meaningfully increase the ROI of any eCommerce investment. Leveraging these tools can improve your efforts to conduct thorough website content monitoring. This is key, as an effective website monitoring system can: 

• Spot broken links;
• Identify errors with plugins;
• Track unusual user behavior and raise security concerns;
• Improve your optimization efforts.

However, if you want to use content monitoring systems and user data effectively, you’ll need to take steps to clean up your data sets and improve the security of your eCommerce site. 

eCommerce ROI and Security

A major security breach is the single biggest threat to your eCommerce site. According to data gathered by IBM, the average data breach costs companies a record-breaking $4.88 million. Allowing data to fall into the wrong hands can damage your brand reputation, too, and may tank sales in your brick-and-mortar stores. 

Minimize the costs associated with breaches by effectively destroying data once it’s no longer in use. An effective data destruction plan typically involves: 

• A policy that gives employees clear direction when handling data;
• Inventorying data based on its sensitivity and confidentiality level; 
• Using data-wiping software with industry-standard algorithms to destroy digital data collected by your eCommerce site;
• Conducting audits to ensure that data is properly cleaned and destroyed. 

These measures reduce the risk of a breach undermining your ROI. Taking measures to clean and destroy old data can lead to eCommerce cost savings, too, as you won’t need to budget for storing data that is useless from a business perspective but could prove costly in the wrong hands. 

Conclusion

Maximizing your ROI with strategic eCommerce investment should be a top priority in the highly competitive world of online sales. You can’t afford to overlook continuity threats when rolling out a series of tools and plugins and should take proactive steps to clean up your data lest you suffer a cybersecurity breach. Even simple changes, like creating action plans, can improve your emergency response times, protect your cash flow, and ensure your eCommerce investment ROI remains high. 

Ready to elevate your brand’s story and captivate your audience? Discover how our tailored marketing services can transform your eCommerce presence. Contact Trellis today and let us help you craft a compelling brand narrative that drives engagement and growth. Your story starts here.

Author bio

Charlie Fletcher is a freelance writer passionate about workplace equity, and whose published works cover sociology, politics, business, education, health, and more. Check out the full portfolio on https://charliefletcher.contently.com/.