The hidden costs of ecommerce growth

Expanding your ecommerce presence comes with some expected costs; adding channels means needing people to manage them, more time spent optimizing product feeds, and more orders to process.?

But there are some other often overlooked costs when brands add new channels and grow their product catalogs.?

#1 Revenue sharing models

If you’re expanding to new channels, you’ve probably looked into a feed management solution to help you scale. But many feed management platforms operate on revenue-sharing models that take a steady percentage of your revenue as you grow.?

Essentially, there’s never a point where it feels like the floodgates have opened, no matter how successful you are and how meticulously you’ve laid the groundwork in your initial investment. If you’re expanding to new ad channels or marketplaces, you already expect to pay for your campaigns and commissions for sales on the marketplaces.?

So before signing up for a new platform, make sure to account for their business models when forecasting your success.

#2 Integration and maintenance?

Integrating your order management system, ecommerce platform, and your product catalogs with new channels isn’t always simple, especially if you have multiple systems and data sources. There’s going to be some kind of flat upfront cost here, and it usually comes in the form of your technical team’s valuable time, and you’re probably putting a few other projects on the backburner as you get off the ground.

But there’s another, sneakier cost that you maybe haven’t considered: ongoing maintenance. Inevitably, changes in your systems or the channels they connect to will require your team to update or troubleshoot your integrations. When this happens unexpectedly or takes longer than anticipated, you might find entire revenue streams are on pause.

Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, managed to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in creating and maintaining connections to its U.S. marketplaces by outsourcing this work to Feedonomics.

#3 Error resolution

Brands that sell on multiple channels need to be aware of each channel’s data requirements. As your catalog grows or your brand expands to new channels, the number of listing errors that you have to contend with increases.

Depending on the channel, support can be limited, so your team needs to be knowledgeable and up-to-date on each channel’s requirements. For many businesses, having dedicated specialists for each channel is just too cost-prohibitive.?

Luckily, some feed management platforms and partners like Feedonomics come equipped with data governance rules that can catch these errors before they make it out into the wild, and include dedicated support and channel experts.

More

Learn how Decathlon mitigated the costs associated with channel integration and error resolution while adding two new marketplace revenue streams.?

Learn how setting automated data governance rules can prevent or alert you of problems in your data, allowing you to address them quickly.?