Research for article - Biggest problems of ecommerce operations

[SolomonD]

Hi, I am writing up an article (for a Blog, not the FT I am afraid) and I wanted to do some informal research on the biggest pain points for ecommerce companies, on their operational side (so not sales and marketing)

Any an all suggestions very gratefully received.

 

[fisicx]

Customers. Whilst necessary for success they are often the biggest pain. And couriers. Do a search of UKBF and you will find loads of stories about courier failures. And lying customers.

 

[SolomonD]

Customers. Whilst necessary for success they are often the biggest pain. And couriers. Do a search of UKBF and you will find loads of stories about courier failures. And lying customers.

Yes customers are an interesting bunch. I have actually suggested internally looking for a business model which does not rely on customers. So far bank robbery is looking pretty good.

 

[Deleted member 335660]

Well I have a problem at the moment and it’s very frustrating.

I use a dropshipper who provides an integration to my woocommerce site. It has been working perfectly for over a year. Last week the integration produced an error which stopped me loading new products to my site through their integration software.

The dropshipper says it’s a blockage on my server, speak to my host. My host says the server is working fine, it must be that their software as it has not been tested on this version of Woocommerce, both say deactivate all the other plugins and keep testing until you find the conflict. I have done this and it still did not work with all the plugins deactivated. Also, for a while it did work and I transferred two products, then it stopped again.

So the problem is that you end up with all these IT suppliers who don’t seem to be able to tell you what your problem is.

 

[antropy]

So the problem is that you end up with all these IT suppliers who don’t seem to be able to tell you what your problem is.

Yes that's usually how it goes. That's why it's good for to get your site hosted by the company that built it so the developer and host can't go round in circles blaming each other.

It sounds like in this case you need a good developer to identify the problem and show proof of what it is.

It does sound to me in this case that it's likely the host firewall blocking the connection to the integration script, but it'd be pretty easy to test this.

Paul.

 

[japancool]

Right now - suppliers.

I can't get any stock. Our product range is primarily from one Japanese manufacturer, who is putting strict limits on the amount of stock they are releasing into the market. None of my suppliers can provide me with the range and quantity I need, and products from other manufacturers simply don't sell as well.

 

[SEODEV#338055]

Hi, I am writing up an article (for a Blog, not the FT I am afraid) and I wanted to do some informal research on the biggest pain points for ecommerce companies, on their operational side (so not sales and marketing)

Any an all suggestions very gratefully received.

Products being out of stock or services being unavailable

 

[Deleted member 335660]

Yes that's usually how it goes. That's why it's good for to get your site hosted by the company that built it so the developer and host can't go round in circles blaming each other.

It sounds like in this case you need a good developer to identify the problem and show proof of what it is.

It does sound to me in this case that it's likely the host firewall blocking the connection to the integration script, but it'd be pretty easy to test this.

Paul.

Well I am the developer and the host is a Wordpress Hosting Site and the integration is a Wordpress Plugin. Host is being helpful and after much badgering the Dropshipper is letting us know what we need to do.

 

[MattRumbelow]

Just a thought... If you're coming up with ideas, maybe go to the Shopify App Store and see what are the most popular ecommerce plugins are. If lots of people on an ecommerce platform have downloaded a certain plugin, you can imagine the problem it solves is pretty common. (Not super scientific but it might help!)

 

[ibadrehman90]

You can also research the issues related to their infrastructure for example their hosting and site security. There are tons of e-commerce stores that go down during holiday seasons because their servers crash and get hit by a cyber attack and lose their data or site.

 

[apricot]

1- Brexit - It did half my sales since! Not a fan of it, sorry. ...

2- Customs - Shipping companies are new scammers, charges crazy prices for simple deliveries

3- China (no offence dear Chinese!) !- Regardless of what idea we came up with, they come in massive tribes and take the space

4- Expanding- Setting up e-commerce is easy as one person when you want to grow, you don't want to hire one person for every role as it is expensive and a waste of time money. There should be more people who are happy to be 'Generalist' and happy to do every basic thing that starts up need...such as posting a social media post or organising a shelf! Ecommerce start shouldn't need to hire multiple people for simple tasks but sadly, not very easy to find employees like that.

5- Networking - Meeting who are in the same industry is hard as for some reason they all think that the other person would start selling whatever they are selling! Which is true but not for everyone, hard to separate these two so no one really wants to talk about what they do.

I am halfway of a bottle of wine, I am pretty sure I have more issues I might continue tomorrow