We’ve replaced this month’s article with a webinar that will help you better understand what outsourcing means for your business and discover the long-term benefits of such a decision. You can listen to it while you do your work, or read it below in your spare time.
- Why should I choose outsourcing solutions for my online shop?
Răzvan Marinescu – Managing Director Simplify:
What you would notice if you were an entrepreneur in the e-commerce field is that, after a while, if you do your job well and your business grows, it becomes more and more difficult to control and focus on the internal kitchen – what’s behind the curtains, to manage the volumes on time. What do you do on a Monday, when the weekend sales piled up and you had to call the courier in the afternoon to give him those extra orders? What do you do on a Tuesday when you have less? Do you call a neighbor for help, call a friend? There are certain challenges that are not necessarily your optimal cost, not necessarily your focus, what you should be doing. As an entrepreneur, you should ultimately concentrate on growing your business.
- What do I need to know when making the decision to outsource?
Carmen Vasilescu – Logistics Director Simplify:
Usually, the first questions that are asked in business are about costs, and volumes, but they are not the most important ones. I think I would want to make sure of the flexibility of the partner I am going to work with, their ability to respond to my picks, and the dynamics of the services they provide. There are many, many elements that I would put in the question’ portfolio before talking in terms of cost and economics. What’s very important when you get into that kind of collaboration is to make sure that they understand your business, that they perceive your needs. Look for a partner who acknowledges your product exactly, because e-commerce is not the same – it depends a lot from one product to another. Find the partner who understands your exact business dynamics and then you’ve found the right one.
Răzvan Marinescu – Managing Director Simplify:
There are a lot of solutions in the market and we also have them in the Simplify ecosystem through our partners – Innoship and easySales – solutions that are handy to make life easier, to offer more value to consumers. I mean, giving them more delivery options, taking advantage of all the opportunities in the courier area, listing you on various e-commerce platforms. There are a lot of opportunities that are, again, at the reach of a hand. It’s very easy to implement them and automate your business. You should find the best solution in the market today so that it doesn’t require your manual input at all times. And, as an e-commerce entrepreneur, your primary focus should be your competitive advantage.
- When is the right time for outsourcing?
Carmen Vasilescu – Logistics Director Simplify:
There is a time when you can control it by yourself: you can also coordinate the order picking, the administrative side, the preparation, the delivery, the courier relations. When you want to grow and want to have the time to create, to think strategically, and to promote your product through marketing, leave the routine to others. That’s when you’ve earned your time, so think about outsourcing.
- Do I need a minimum number of orders?
Răzvan Marinescu – Managing Director Simplify:
There are no large, medium and large customers. We are many at the beginning, it’s a very entrepreneurial area and we don’t want to treat customers as small or big. They’re all important – a customer who now has 10 orders a day may have 200-300 in two years and it is very important what solutions you offer them at the beginning. Loyalty has been built when the need is great, when it’s about trust – because you invest trust in a partnership like that.
- Who are Simplify’s partners and what services can they offer me?
Daniel Nicolae – Co-Founder & Managing Partner Innoship:
Innoship is a technology company that helps e-commerce businesses efficiently manage their own courier contracts, resulting in a cost benefit, increased delivery service quality and a better experience offered to the end customer. Innoship is in the middle, between a retail company’s infrastructure and couriers, connected on one side with all courier companies via API and exposes a single connectivity to retail companies. Thus, once connected to Innoship, you can send orders to any courier company in the local and international market. No more development costs with APIs & maintenance and, at the end of the day, you have ease of exploration – you can communicate and do business with any type of courier and any courier service.
Ciprian Cazacu – Co-Founder & CEO Easy Sales:
We provide the e-commerce infrastructure through the connector we have with each customer and from that point on they are free to choose where they sell, how they sell, to synchronize their stocks in real time. As a result, they don’t have situations where they sell, for example, products that they don’t have in stock because the same product was sold through multiple channels. We’re basically replacing all the development they would have to do for each marketplace and each channel. We also have a reporting area where they can see in real time what’s going on, they can pull up a history, see how sales have fluctuated, which areas have sold the most, which products have sold the most, which product has had a high return. They have all sorts of reports that help them make a decision subsequent to the integrations they’ve done.
Daniel Nicolae – Co-Founder & Managing Partner Innoship:
We look at how we improve the post-sales process. How can we manage to bring optimizations in the way we communicate with the end customer, how do we keep the customer updated with the sales process. We communicate with them via email or SMS at appropriate times so that they stay updated and trust that we keep them up to date with all the important things that are happening to them. We do this and thus manage to reduce the return rate. Implementing Innoship brings you very fast, from day one, cost savings, increased quality of delivery service and a reduction in the return rate.
- What advantages will I get for delivery services?
Daniel Nicolae – Co-Founder & Managing Partner Innoship:
Just two clicks are all that separates you from choosing another courier you want to work with. Just put your credentials and that’s it! And if at some point you want to work with a company that doesn’t exist in our courier library, we’ll implement it within a certain time frame, as per contract, at no cost to you.
- I’d like to outsource my services, but I’m afraid. What should I do?
Carmen Vasilescu – Logistics Director Simplify:
We had a client debut in our Simplify portfolio that went through the excitement of outsourcing for the first time. It was a fantastic emotion, they would call me every night and say “I’m not sleeping, I don’t know if I made the right decision, I don’t know if, when I decided to outsource, I did the right thing. Tell me, did I do the right thing?”. When they would ask those questions they would put pressure on my shoulders, I have to admit. We did our best to recover in one day, when the products came in, a very high volume of orders, and then I got a message that I think will stay with me for life. It said “now I sleep peacefully and from tomorrow I will implement my marketing strategy”.
- Why should I choose an e-fulfillment partner like Simplify?
Răzvan Marinescu – Managing Director Simplify:
The goods are picked up or purchased by an online shop from somewhere – from a supplier that could be in Bangladesh, it could be in Poland, near Fălticeni, anywhere. We take over the communication with that supplier, we take care of bringing the goods either by air, by road, by courier – by whatever solution is possible on the market at the time. We bring the goods into Simplify warehouse and we’re integrated through the API solutions with online stores or platforms where they operate. We take orders from customers, we prepare orders for those customers. We have a connected interface with the whole catalog of national and international couriers and in this way we send the goods to our customer’s consumer. So we meet a wide range of needs. And we not only cover it, we optimize it, that’s the important message. We have control of the whole logistics chain, we have a very strong focus on the technology area and access to a very detailed and complex database, so we can come up with solutions and ideas to optimize the logistics solutions of online shops.
- What else do I need to know about my shop website?
Adriana Ceausescu – Partner & Information Security Officer AA Data Box:
It all starts with an audit of the website you own. The audit is about the secure link part – if you have that https security certificate instead of http. Secondly, it audits the vulnerabilities of the website. As I said, implementing measures to secure access to databases. An example would be 2FA – two factor authentication, which is increasingly used, including for VPN access in company IT systems.
Ionuț Dumitru – CEO ClusterCS:
ClusterCS is a server management system for web hosting. It has to sit on a server somewhere in a data center and certain software on it will deliver content from the database to form the image of the site that we see. This server has to be configured – there are various software that are installed – and this is where ClusterCS comes in with automating these installations, configurations, and everything that is needed to deliver the site content to the public. A cluster can provide this redundancy function. For example, if a server goes down, this event is not felt by the end user. The system will still work, the rest of the servers take over that task, all page requests are redirected to the rest of the working servers and the system continues to run smoothly. For Black Friday type of traffic, a margin of safety can be taken – if one or two servers go down I can set a margin of safety so that the surviving system can handle the traffic.
- How do you improve communication with your customers?
Elena Bululete – Managing Partner Conan PR:
You can use the tools that the platforms provide, as well as the insights you get from your website. For example, one piece of information that I found very interesting is that most online shopping was done on weekends – Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with the highest activity on Saturday evening between 18:00 – 22:00. So, establish your ads online when your audience is online and make use of all that information. A lot of people shop on the go, so take a look at your online store and see how complicated the purchase process is, think about how mobile friendly the version you use is, think about how many steps it takes someone who sees one of your products on Facebook or Instagram to buy, how long it takes to put it in their shopping cart. If the answers to these questions are more like “I don’t quite meet these requirements”, rethink your business plan a bit because a well planned business does cover these costs.