Cloud-based ecommerce solutions have been a part of the industry for a decade, but only recently have they been able to make their identity and prove their effectiveness to the markets and businesses.
They have now become widely available. In this article, we will examine the technological advancements within SaaS and discuss how they benefit our ecommerce businesses and what makes them so popular, so stay tuned!
The first question that comes to mind is what does “cloud” or “SaaS” ecommerce even mean? Simply put, SaaS ecommerce is electronic commerce, internet commerce, or online shopping. E-commerce is the activity of purchasing products or services online for a price, not entirely business-to-customer bases. It is also business-to-business based.
“SaaS” stands for “Software as a Service,” and, concerning ecommerce, it directs to software licensing opportunities that authorize effortless admission to data stored on clouds.
It means that corporations can subscribe to a package proposed by SaaS providers. They do not have to worry about server upkeep, storage problems, software glitches, backups, and everyday tech troubles, as the third-party owner is accountable for maintaining the cloud and the software.
You can reason that investing in a SaaS platform is like a one-stop shop, where the retailer can have their e-shop set up hassle-free.
Most providers offer admiringly customizable and variable products, guaranteeing customers' needs through often updated plugins, attachments, and recent applications.
Following are four things you must consider when scaling your SaaS ecommerce business:
The quality of your SaaS business depends upon your developers. Skilled developers will carry your business toward stability by improving your software, whether taking care of the bugs from your current offering or developing exciting software that customers will love.
Simply put, your developers can make or break your SaaS. If you’re not taking adequate supervision of these developers, it will be unattainable to scale your business to its maximum potential.
Pulling a developer to accomplish simple customer service tasks is not the most profitable use of that respective resource. Why set them to work on your mile-long chargeback list when they’re you pay them to enhance and boost your software offerings?
Instead, enforce a full-stack e-commerce solution with complete back-office services; this will guarantee that the customer service tasks are in consideration, liberating your developers to perform up to their potential.
Articulating customer services, do you have the customer support team needed to scale your SaaS business? As your customer base extends, so will the customer support queue. If you don’t have a full-proof system to manage your customers’ issues, you’ll lose customers quicker than you earn them.
67% of customer churn is preventable if you have a customer support cortege in training to deal with the issues at the first moment of engagement with the consumer.
Further, you can switch 11% of churn if your customer service team contacts the customer to inquire where things went wrong and if the service makes an effort to make things right.
An e-commerce solution with back-office services will not only provide you with the customer service assistance you need. Still, it will also ensure that your e-commerce platform is functioning at its peak, reducing the number of calls you get related to the purchasing process. Oversight to train for the unavoidable upswing in customer support calls and emails is improvident.
If you’re keen to scale your SaaS business, you must get your marketing and sales staff into the mix. Your marketing staff must be skillful in marketing to a new audience. They should be willing to adopt cutting-edge marketing strategies to deal with a fresh market.
Expansion hacking is a non-traditional approach to attaining traction among forward-thinking marketers, but marketers should not ignore the classics, such as content marketing, SEO, and brand engagement.
Your sales team must ensure that it has people enthusiastic about selling your product to the crowd. Please encourage them to reach out to social media influencers. Furthermore, never forget the value of cross-selling and up-selling to current clients.
Forming solid alliances beyond the standard business congregation will extend their reach and add significance to your services.
Concentrating on improving the significance and profundity of your data will boost the number of crises you can decipher, establishing you as a market leader as you strengthen your affiliation with your customers within the ecommerce industry.
You’ll be capable of penetrating about 60% of the market if you focus on upright evolution — distinguish that from the horizontal growth’s penetration of 5-10%, and the conclusion is a no-brainer.
While your intuition might be to toss your net wide to seize as considerable buyers in as many new industries as probable, suppose expanding vertically rather than horizontally. When you dig into a specific sector, you’ll be part of a growing movement among SaaS industries.
Vertical SaaS organizations are evolving far more swiftly than their horizontal companions due primarily to the heightened need for industry-specific components.
Not everyone is tech-savvy; some of us find it complicated to work. But when it comes to running your ecommerce business, you need to use some tools and software to make sales and market your brand.
Now, you must be thinking, can’t we keep the complex software bearing out of the picture and still run our ecommerce business? Unfortunately, it is impossible due to technological advancements; the competition has risen, and you need to utilize some software to help bring your business to the next level.
Software as a service platform is popular due to the demand among the customers, which comes from the simplification, access, and affordability it offers to run your business smoothly. Via SaaS, you can easily understand and function complicated software and infrastructural components of IT.
Therefore, running your large-scale enterprise without the software for service platforms, you can't reach your desired growth. The software distribution models offer good dexterity and cost-effectiveness for ecommerce businesses, making them exceptionally trustworthy for multiple business models.
SaaS software distribution models are popular among businesses due to their simplicity, security, user-comfort accessibility, and widespread connectivity.
Diminished costs, quicker deployment, and improved accessibility are good enough to sustain your company's progress. Still, are these the only ways SaaS platforms can help your business? No! They also offer some other low-key advantages which can benefit your business.
SaaS solutions are compatible with different devices and versions of operating systems; this allows open communication of SaaS-related files across team members or other tools of the same person without compromising the commission or impression of the SaaS platform.
When pressed under the compatibility umbrella, cloud-based platforms qualify for the effortless addition of new users and products to the existing system, making integration convenient.
Investing in a cloud-based ecommerce platform can improve collaboration with business divisions, especially across employees responsible for ecommerce-related factors (products, marketing, channels, customer service).
It can also advertise cross-team cooperation. The IT team (responsible for general IT matters, including SaaS features) and the business team (responsible for product development, sales, and general performance, using data obtained from the SaaS platform) can use the same venue differently.
They can also use the “SaaS vocabulary” to communicate effectively instead of their respective vocabularies, which might be indecipherable across teams.
A well-known advantage of cloud-based platforms over on-premise ones is their scalability.
The sky is the limit, not the breadth of a server. Not being restricted by the storage capacity of your platform host conveys you can efficiently absorb high traffic and present new products. But how can that improve your business?
From the end of the SaaS solution, you can exalt your plan with unique elements and tools that can boost your business activity. It is a win-win scenario from any point of view!
There are many benefits to a software-as-a-service ecommerce platform; some of the main ones are:
No company wants the hassle of upkeep; they want it sorted out of the picture. To be completely free of the mundane chores, you need a platform for your business to do it. A small third-party company with access to your server is the most suitable option. You save money on a strong IT team.
The role of platform providers is to provide products developed and ready to go, saving time and money for the consumer. Most delivered products are customizable and uncomplicated to functionalize, so customers can construct the platform they always dreamt of at the click of their fingers.
Another significant benefit of SaaS platforms compared to on-premise possibilities is scalability. The vision that led to the birth of the cloud was the requirement for more repositories on the go, which was unattainable with in-house servers. Nonetheless, using a cloud server qualifies for on-demand storage and bandwidth growth, supporting the business deal with increased traffic on the go, not as a future investment.
In cloud and SaaS platforms, the platform provider bears accountability for data protection, not the business. The third part is liable for contemporizing the systems and rectifying bugs that could compromise safety. It is a two-level trust between the service provider, the company, and its consumers.
There are some minimum costs when shopping for a SaaS platform and the price increases with add-ons or special features. However, the price is typically more subordinate to building an ecommerce platform from scratch, as it does not fit development or maintenance costs.
Time is meaningful for everyone operating a business, as there is consistently something to do. Reckon how much time you will save in an industry where employees do not have to worry about spending time waiting for maintenance or updates? A lot, right? Financing in a SaaS, cloud-based platform can save time, which can be invested elsewhere and devise other business sectors. As mentioned above, a SaaS option is pre-made and handled by a third-party corporation, meaning a SaaS ecommerce platform can deploy faster and be regularly kept and revised by someone else. Another way that SaaS can assist in improving your business is that there is no need for a team to physically be at the primary server to access data and sensitive information. All information and data are on a cloud database. Access is easy for anyone with the required credentials from anywhere with a proper internet connection. Besides increased accessibility, this also suggests that data concerning ecommerce can be available at all times, from anywhere, even simultaneously, and not sealed up in a room, unreachable to business stakeholders who might need them.
Scaling your SaaS solution refers to helping your products and sales grow. For further growth and development after the initial sales stage, there are three golden ways to scale your SaaS product:
Restyling
Investing and making a presence in new markets
Growth of net revenue retention
There are many methods to scale sales with SaaS; some of them are:
Adopting important sales metrics
Optimizing your team
Focusing on customer experience
Finetune your prices
SaaS has several advantages for your business, such as flexibility of licensing, easy deployment plans, updating, and installation of the latest software, a more intelligent approach to sales and revenue prediction, scalability arrangements according to customers' needs, etc.
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