Etail Solutions Blog

Growing your ecommerce business can seem like a complex process. There are endless numbers of strategies available at your fingertips. But according to business growth advisor and best-selling author,
Jay Abraham, there are really only 3 ways to grow any business - online or off:

• Get more customers
• Get customers to buy more
• Get customers to buy more often

Many online sellers tend to focus on the first method - expanding into new sales channels or bringing new suppliers on board - or both - to drive growth. Because of this, too little attention is paid to the second and third methods. 

The benefits of using FBA to fulfill your orders are obvious. However, putting all your eggs in this basket can limit growth because it requires large amounts of capital. This blog post describes how some sellers have solved the cash flow problems caused by FBA. You’ll find out how to offer more products on more channels and listings - without tying up any capital - by using a fulfillment method not called drop shipping in tandem with FBA.

In 2012, Jerry Kavesh was running a successful western-wear retail business and coming off his best year ever. That’s when he decided to close the business.

Because while almost half the sales were coming in online, the brick-and-mortar stores were projected to lose money and he wanted the 62-year-old family business to end on a positive note.

He got out of retailing. Joined a start-up. Didn’t give his past life of selling cowboy boots, Stetson hats, western shirts much thought.

Then, one night, while browsing Amazon, he noticed that several of the best-selling SKUs from his former retail business weren’t even listed on Amazon.

If it isn’t getting seen, it isn’t getting sold. Experienced Amazon sellers know this hard truth: to get more sales, more buyers need to see your product in more listings. And creating those listings can be an expensive, time consuming and error-prone process.

"We had two-or-three fulltime people trying to match ASINs manually," said one Amazon top 500 seller. "When we brought in a new supplier that often meant 30-40,000 matches done by hand. It would take months."

Ed Harvey had a problem and saw an opportunity. The problem: he’d been running 15 ecommerce sites for a national health and beauty multi-level marketer. But they decided to take everything in-house, so he was out of business.

The opportunity: One of those sites was a close-out site and he had just bought a warehouse – full of unsold merchandise.

With growth comes challenges. Managing inventory is one of them.

Inventory management is one of the most common reasons fast-growing sellers decide to replatform. The challenge of managing inventory across multiple suppliers, channels and listings is often too great for their current disparate systems. And the consequences of not mastering inventory management are high - including tying up capital in overstocks, losing sales in out-of-stocks, and even account suspension.

Growth is good. Unless it keeps you up all night. Just ask Chris Unangst and his wife, owners of Olivabel, an online retailer of consumer electronics and other products. 

Soon after Hurricane Katrina devastated Florida - and Chris' real estate business - Chris experimented with dropshipping products he sold on Amazon. His business quickly grew from a handful of orders a day to 50-60 daily orders and Chris struggled to keep up.

"As we got bigger, it got tougher and tougher to control inventory and pricing," Chris said. "It was almost embarrassing; I was working well into the night, every night. I was going through thousands of listings manually adjusting them, and then when I got done, I started over again."

Repricing is the lifeblood of a successful Amazon business. And it's often the first part of the business to be automated - and eventually outgrown.

"About 90% of the time the merchant who wins the Buy Box gets the sale," said Michael Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Etail Solutions. "So sellers quickly realize how important it is to be priced competitively - and how impossible it is to do that without automation."

He knew how to sell - he’d spent more than 40 years in retail. He knew opportunity when he saw it - it was 2012 and Amazon was continuing its explosive growth and people already were starting to prefer buying even everyday items like tools, hardware, and home improvement products online.

He knew he needed a software development partner - the ecommerce software available in 2012 wasn’t remotely robust enough to execute his vision of bringing an endless aisle of home improvement products to the web.

He chose Etail Solutions - and he never looked back.

Bailey is the Etail Solutions office dog.

She runs the place.

Michael, Bailey's human and Etail's CEO, might disagree.

But when Michael calls Bailey he's usually ignored. When Bailey barks, Michael comes running. So who runs what?

Along with greeting visitors and creating heightened awareness for the importance of keeping your lunch bag off the floor, Bailey serves another important function here at Etail. Here's just a sample: