If your website was a house, what would it look like? How big? What color? How would someone get from the front door to the back?

The parallels for building an ecommerce website to building a house are there. Or at least we’re forcing the analogy so humor us for a little bit. We’re all looking for a lovely spot to call home. Your site holds your name, your feel, importantly your prosperity, and that prosperity brings shelter and safety for your business. Don’t mind us, websites make us a little emotional.

But your website shouldn’t be the same as your neighbor's. Even on the same street, you two have wildly different needs. Maybe you’re building a woodsy cabin, or a glitzy mansion, a tiny home on a big yard, OR you’ve inherited something truly wacky and you’re trying to retrofit your own style back into (good luck, we know how tough this is).

If you’re wondering how to spend your building budget on an ecommerce home, we’re recommending three categories. Put (forced) into our home analogy, it’s the Foundational spending, the Strucutural spending, and the Furnishing spending. Our suggestion? You need ALL three but if you spend too much in one section, you’ll end up creating a house that is strong as steel but doesn’t have a couch in it. How's that for an image?

Want an image of YOUR ecommerce home? We have a home inspection self-assessment. Yep, we built you an assessment of where your home is at and how to build out that new addition.

Foundational

For your foundational spending, we think about something that EVERY merchant needs to have. You might spend more or less on these sections than your neighbor but if you don’t have one of these things, you’re missing a big section of foundation and your business could face sinking or collapse. Think of these as the slab, plumbing, roof of the house, that kind of thing. Remember the woodsy cabin might have less spent on plumbing, but you still need something.

• Website - At its most basic, you need a website. Like the foundation/slab, you need a place to build everything from. If you take anything from this, you need a solid foundation to build off of. You can’t think about moving a couch in if your foundation is crumbling.
• Fulfillment operations - These might be the windows and doors. Get things in and out. Critical for selling something. You need to get things out of your house and into the hands of others.
• Effective means of communicating with customers (usually this is email) - There’s a reason we register our address. Like the government, you have to provide your customers with a way to contact you (hopefully you want to contact them too). This also includes promotion and marketing. Don’t forget that no one will know you moved in if you don’t tell them!
• Payment processing and tax system - The plumbing, nothing sexy here but you’ll quickly know when you’re missing it.
• A system to manage your inventory - Your inventory is the power to your business, this is your electrical system. Where is everything and how is it connected?
• CRM - Your security system– it’s how you know who is coming and going. Are you getting the analogy? We’ll let you fill the rest of these in by yourself. Let your imagination run home.

Structural

While you might not necessarily NEED these per se, not having one of these will definitely negatively impact your business. You might spend more or less on these sections than your neighbor but if you don’t have one of these things, you’re still missing a ton of structure to your house. These are your walls, your room layout, appliances, beams and boards. This is where businesses might start making decisions that differentiate them from their neighbors. HOW do you walk through your house? These are the things that ultimately increase the inspection value of your house.

• Branding - The substance and style of your personality? Are you ultra modern and minimalist? Over the top and colorful? This impacts everything from your baseboards to your window size. Branding is what makes your business look like you, and not the brutalist guy down the street.
• Integrations between systems - This might be from your ecommerce platform to CRM/ERP but it also can include more complex integrations across a web of systems. Think of it like the space between your walls. Everyone has it, but what you’re shoving in there makes a HUGE difference.
• Customer Service (email/chat) - Stuff goes wrong. Usually, when it rains, it pours too. The best way to handle customer service is directly, quickly, and with a hefty dose of overcompensation. If there’s one thing that can make a forever customer, it’s how you respond to a problem.
• Performance Marketing (Ads, SEO, Social, etc.) - The person next to you might know you showed up in your house but two streets away? They have no idea. Remember the old saying ‘Build it and they will come?’ That’s garbage. We like ‘Build it and then tell everyone that you built it and about 10% of them might come’.
• Search - Kind of like free performance marketing. Make your site all about YOU but also make it easy for Google to look through. Without good search and SEO, you’re out of the phonebook and very hard to find.
• Reviews - A good site is a good site. But reviews can take you up to a great site. Social proof, honest reviews, and great photos can all take a customer on the edge and send ‘em right off the cliff into ‘loyal customer land’. Nail your reviews and you’ll soar.
• Fulfillment/Shipping Software - A rock solid, optimized fulfillment process with well-built automation, order management, and more is one of those items that look back and say ‘how did we get anything done before this?’ It’s not like a couple extra square feet, it’s like moving to a whole new neighborhood. Good process accelerates good businesses to powerful performers.

Furnishings

Here’s where the fun stuff lives. These take the most rustic house to truly a home. These aren’t less important, they’re just different priorities. How does it FEEL to walk through your house. You might have some walls up but without furniture, electronics, home entertainment, photos on the wall, your house will never be a home. These things make your house feel comfortable, comfortable to have people over (and sit down somewhere), even feel like home. With these add-ons and capabilities, your business might need an addition soon. Without them, you got some sticks on a slab.

• Email to SMS Integrations - Email is great. SMS is great. Integrations between these systems make your brand look like it’s moving at 100mph. Customer ordered something? Confirmation with remarketing via SMS. Coordinated email with accessory products at a discount. Shipping confirmation. Restocking. There’s so much upside to email and SMS working together.
• Loyalty, Rewards, Subscriptions - The big three. The way you roll these three out could be like the couch, loveseat, and chair in your living room. They make people feel warm and invited into your home. They’re a nice place to relax. They bring people together. These three are powerful retention tools, keeping your best customers the closest.
• Buy Now, Pay Later/Split Payment/Flexible Payment options - Again, not going to replace your credit card processor but alternate payment options and flexible financing might be the different of getting a sale and another abandoned cart.
• Personalization - Depending on how you use personalization, we’d accept an argument that it should really live in structural (let us know how wrong we are, we love to hear it). Personalization can be instrumental in your ecommerce presence. Good quality data, strong integrations between systems, solid attributions and we’ll bump this over into structural for you.
• Branded Shipping + Returns - Want a PRIME example of branded shipping and returns? Buy a pair of sunglasses from goodr. Their brand oozes off their tracking pages, email confirmations, and more. Custom branded shipping might not replace a solid infrastructure but damn if it doesn’t make people want to celebrate your brand.

Shipstation So where does shipping and fulfillment fit in with all of this? Honestly, it’s all of the above. Let’s break it down. Shipping/Fulfillment is a foundational consideration simply because if you’re selling online, you need a way to get the products your customers order to them. Whether that is by a carrier delivering their order to their home or offering a pick-up in-store option, your customers need a way to receive their orders. As straightforward as that is, the fun doesn’t end there.

Shipping and fulfillment is also a structural consideration in that, having well-developed fulfillment workflows and operations can literally save you significant amounts of time and money while creating a memorable customer experience. At the BARE MINIMUM, using a fulfillment platform like ShipStation saves you time and money by allowing you to pull and manage your incoming orders across all of your selling channels, compare and shop multiple carrier services and rates, and print your labels in one place. Take it a step further by utilizing ShipStation’s walleted rates for significant discounts on carrier services and employing automation rules to streamline the pick, pack, ship process for specific SKUs or product categories, thus reducing packing/fulfillment errors. What does that mean for your customers? The faster and more accurately you’re able to pack and ship your orders, the faster your customers will receive them. The faster they receive them, the happier they’ll be. See where we’re going with this?

As mentioned above, shipping and fulfillment also fall into the Furnishings category, specifically when thinking about personalization and extending your brand to your customers. We all know customers love receiving their shipping confirmation and delivery tracking emails. Instead of sending them the standard carrier-branded email and routing them to that carrier’s tracking page, send them those emails with your branding incorporated in and route them to a branded tracking page. Optimize these branded emails and tracking pages to recommend related products or solicit reviews. The point here is that your shipping and fulfillment operations allow you to add an additional level of personalization and keep your brand top of mind without much additional effort. You’re sending the order status notifications anyway (or at least you should be), why not leverage them as an extension of your brand? Will branding your order status emails and tracking pages be a critical tactic of your business? Most likely not. What it will do is create another touchpoint for customers to engage with your brand, visit your site, and hopefully buy more from you before they’ve even received their initial order. In other words, it’s a simple retention tactic that, at worst builds loyalty and rapport with your existing customers and at best, generates additional sales and improves retention.

Irish Titan Having an agency you trust (like a home inspector or architect), execute this plan is important. Without a knowledgeable team of designers, builders, and marketers (our analogy has finally failed us), your house may not be built well and could crumble around you. We build houses right the first time, from the ground up. We work directly with merchants to decide the blueprint (we just call it a greenprint), where the dollars should go, and how to decorate. Building without a team like that is possible, but opens a bigger risk of needing to start over rebuild. Can you afford to take that risk?

Remember building your house is just the first step, if you want people over, you’ll need a marketing plan and budget to spend on invites. Don’t forget that ‘build it and they will come’ is garbage. We rather like ‘build it and tell everyone you’re having a house party’.