- Most e-commerce agencies live from a base and a commission on sales. Since the base is often quite high, there is no risk for the agency if a project fails. When they have a large number of clients, it is impossible for everyone to succeed. However, the agency does not have to worry, as it has the constant security of its own income resulting from the collection of base fees.
- If the agency foregoes the base fee, it very often allows itself to stay with just a
% fee on generated sales. Such a model may seem attractive from the point of view of a contractor who wants to start expanding. However, there is also a catch here. If the agency gives up the base it very often reflects this in a high % on sales. Even 30%.
In today’s day and age where e-commerce is a very dynamic market and often low margin by the many costs that have to be incurred along the way to sell successfully this can kill any profitability of the project.
Be damned if you do and damned if you don’t
The only valid alternative route is to work with a BPO company like LetsPRO.
In the form of outsourcing, we offer access to our e-commerce specialists, who will lead the expansion into foreign marketplaces and handle the entire account. In this form, you pay for the employee and, in fact, for the work he or she will do for you.
The complete e-commerce team consists of departments:
- listings – the department that creates and optimises auctions
- advertising – department responsible for market place ads and marketing, product traffic generation
- analytics – department that extracts and analyses data from the market place
- compliance – the department that deals with compliance checks, solves legal problems, keeps an eye on accounts and unblocks them if necessary
- customer service – delivering the high expectations of e.g. amazon regarding the treatment of customers
- graphics – a department of product graphic designers who know the market place guidelines for images, graphics, video and graphic descriptions
You decide how many and which specialists you need from the above departments.
We give you a suggestion as to how many there should be in the initial stages of implementation or in the further stages of your e-commerce development.
In such a formula, specific people work for you, specialists, where a full schedule of committed work is available, and we can make changes to the project on an ongoing basis and achieve specific goals.
Each team is assigned a project leader with whom we have access at all times.
This person will help design the strategy and implement it. The project leader also manages and makes sure that the objectives and generally the work done by the team is delivered.
The project leader is unpaid.
Promise the moon
Sales from e-commerce agencies very often charm their customers and promise them golden mountains. However, one has to face the truth. Today, e-commerce is not strewn with garlands of pretty roses. It is a tough and difficult industry.
These days, you can’t promise XYZ net margin over a certain period of time. If any agency does that, it shows that they are just trying to sell their service by throwing around words with no cover.
The work carried out by our specialists is actually what we define for ourselves in the project. That is to say, we start by defining a strategy, then we define what we want to do, where we want to develop, which countries, what products, calculate our costs and margins, and then we start implementing. No unnecessary promises, no unnecessary fancy talk and no blue-sky talk.
And we just keep working.
We charge a specialist on this.
You delegate the tasks, the team is implemented. Can it be done more simply? Probably not.
This is why most collaborations with agencies fail and agencies are shrouded in disrepute.
When you choose e-commerce outsourcing at LetsPRO, specific specialists do specific commissioned work.
There are a lot of companies and projects at the agency, and the people employed there handle several dozen projects at a time. How do you maintain quality with this kind of work and get a satisfactory result?
I leave this question unanswered.
I cordially invite you to contact me to find out more about using outsourcing in your
e-commerce: www.rentproteam.com/contact
