Online commerce may appear simple, straightforward, and easy in hindsight, but the reality is different. From order processing, shipping, return & refund, and stock management to payments, each task needs to be handled efficiently, timely, and accurately as all of these functions are critical to the overall running of e-commerce support and may affect profitability. The point to understand this is unlike brick-and-mortar stores, ecommerce sellers get fewer chances to engage and impress visitors due to the lack of physical touchpoints and everything needs to be done from the platform. Therefore, sales, admin and e-commerce support tasks become all the more vital to managing overall business success.
This blog post aims to help you understand these critical functions and ways to improve these operations.
Sales Admin and E-commerce Support: Challenges Galore
Managing ecommerce administration operations poses multiple challenges for admins like efficient and timely order processing, optimized stocks management, minimizing errors in inventory management, ensuring timely and proper packaging, fast payments processing, timely returns & refunds, and meeting customer expectations for fast and reliable delivery. The chain is pretty long and complicated, with ample chance of making mistake at any stage. This complexity keeps rising when covering several sales channels.
Not only sales admin, even the role of customer support is no less demanding. A research study by Forrester also confirms this. It says that more than 50% of retailers face challenges related to customer service. Hence, the customer rep must communicate effectively and promptly respond to resolve customers’ grievances.
We have outlined a compilation of the challenges encountered in sales administration and e-commerce support:
Firstly, managing a high volume of orders efficiently, timely, and error-free, especially during peak seasons can be overwhelming.
Secondly, stock management poses a challenge, as it requires tracking and forecasting accurate stock levels, real-time updates, and synchronization across multiple platforms.
The complexity further grows as the number of channels, countries, or ecommerce accounts grow as it becomes more challenging to keep oversight.
Furthermore, that’s where the role of stock handling and management comes into the picture, as you need to ensure enough stocks are always available to fulfil the order. You should be able to anticipate demand accurately.
Thirdly, ensure that the ordered products are picked, packed, and shipped quickly.
Fourth, if a customer faces any issue at any stage of the buying journey, they should be able to contact customer rep quickly through a live chat, email or call support. And if a product fails to meet customer’s expectations, it should be returned quickly and the amount should be refunded.
Fifth, these challenges amplify when sellers have multiple ecommerce accounts. They’re selling on Amazon, present on eBay and Etsy, and even have their own website and social media channels. Just imagine the enormity of processing orders, handling stocks, shipping, payments, and providing customer support on multiple channels on multiple channels, and consider the enormity of the task.
Managing these tasks solely with sales admin and e-commerce support is practically unfeasible, given the task’s time-consuming, arduous, and complex nature. Is it possible to update the data everytime whenever a product is sold on any channel? it’s humanely not possible as you’ll need to login/logout multiple times. The same holds true for customer support.
Solution: Software System Holds the Key
That’s where a software system can be a helpful aid in managing admin, sales and e-commerce support. A multi channel Sales software; It centralizes data from various ecommerce channels, eliminating the need for manual updates across multiple platforms, saving time, and reducing errors. Additionally, it plays a pivotal role in improving the quality of customer support function. To identify recurring pain points experienced by customers, access to consolidated data from various platforms is vital as it enables customer reps to address and mitigate issues proactively.
Thus, it empowers sales admins and e-commerce support teams to easily navigate the complexities of ecommerce operations and deliver superior experiences to customers.
Final Words
The world of ecommerce is much more than a few clicks and taps. Each task, from order processing to customer service, must be orchestrated perfectly, requiring a well-coordinated sales admin and e-commerce support team. The more channels you cover, the more sales you have, the more important automatisation and data handling becomes.
