Tools You Need to Scale Your eCommerce Biz (And Make Your Life Easier)

Is your business growing? If so, that’s wonderful — and challenging. As businesses climb steadily upward, small problems become bigger, small tasks weigh you down, and you realize that in order to scale, some things are going to have to change.

There are some basic tools that will help your business grow steadily and prevent you from experiencing growth-related major headaches and massive meltdowns. These tools are designed to:

• 1. create scalability of sales
  2. integrate tools for less legwork and synced up systems
  3. improve team communication

Step 1: Choose a Scalable Platform with Shopify Plus

We’re Shopify Plus experts, so it’s no surprise that we’re huge fans of this eCommerce platform. But we’ve chosen to be Shopify Plus experts because we love what they do and how they do it. Their goal is to make selling easy and scalable for merchants.

Here are the reasons Shopify Plus makes scaling your business easy:

Built to Scale. Shopify Plus’s cloud-based infrastructure (which powers over 800,000 merchants at 80,000 requests per second) was built to be resilient, with systems for controlled latency and solutions to ensure no single point of failure. This means your site can easily manage traffic spikes without crashing or slowing down. Flash sales, highly publicized TV/ad placement, Black Friday — go for it. Your site will keep up.

24/7 Tech Support. Most of us aren’t full-stack developers who can fix a broken line of code in the blink of an eye, or resolve some obscure site issue without hours of research. Shopify Plus has a veritable army of customer support reps on call night and day to help you out of any pickle.

Easy management. Shopify Plus’s LaunchPad makes updating products a breeze and Shopify PlusFlow makes creating new workflows simple and seamless. It requires virtually no coding knowledge to use, so even the least tech-savvy merchant can easily manage their own site changes. No dev team required.

Streamlined Interface. Checkout needs to be easy and fast, and Shopify Plus has designed exactly that. Based on mountains of data collected from their 800k+ merchants, they’ve created a streamlined checkout experience, from product page to shopping cart. And of course, digital wallet integrations are a given.

Step 2: Integrate Your Various Systems with FlowLink

Without system integration, eCommerce owners find themselves doing a lot of unnecessary work. They enter orders here, send them to the shipping provider over there, update the tracking numbers, add the new customer to the CRM, etc. etc.

When your business is small, these extra few minutes per order don’t make too much of a difference. But as you grow, this lack of cohesion quickly becomes a huge time-vacuum. It’s easy to find yourself up to your ears in incompatible eCommerce plugins and convoluted spreadsheets of shipping data, price updates, customer reports, and more.

Our recommendation is FlowLink. Their system integration offers:

1. Ability to see across all those systems from one location. For example, FlowLink provides details on every single Product, Customer, Shipment, and Order, and how each flowed from system to system.
2. Error notifications for all systems in one place. Arguably even more vital, FlowLink can tell eCommerce owners when something is wrong and where — you don’t have to log into systems to check for issues, because the FlowLink integration will catch any glitches in your workflows and let you know about it.
3. Simple scalability as your business grows. Flowlink’s flexible system integrations remove the excess manual labor and easily scale with your growing business. It’s also a cinch to set up — and yes, we know everyone says that, but this time, it’s actually true.

Flowlink has dozens of integrations syncing up the top tools in eCommerce: QuickBooks, MailChimp, Salesforce, ZenDesk, Aftership, Twilio, WooCommerce, NetSuite, eBay, Amazon, and more.

If they don’t have a system integration you need? You can ask them for it and they’ll look into setting it up for you.

Step 3: Choose a Communications App Like Slack

The ability to communicate and collaborate easily with team members and partners is so often overlooked. When you are small and your team comprised of yourself, two part-timers, and the office dog, a combo of text, email, and phone calls was a reasonable solution. But as you grow (and not just in team size, but in sales as well), a central communication point becomes essential.

There are a dozen or more communication apps out there to choose from, but our preference is Slack. (A few alternatives would include Trello, Telegram, G Suite, Flock. Skype, Fleep, Microsoft Teams.)

Whichever route you go, your communications app is going to make your life easier because it will offer:

1. A central place for communication.  Most communication apps allow you to organize your chats into public, private and one-to-one conversations. You can have as many chats as you need; one for the sales team, one for your marketing team, another for your distribution team, etc. This separation allows you to organize communication for each area of your business without cluttering up a single text stream.
2. A centralized location for sharing files. Organize images, PDFs, spreadsheets, Google Drive links, and Dropbox files. Add comments to them, star them, and easily search for them two months later when you inevitably forget where you put it on your external hard drive.
3. You can integrate with other apps so you can get your notifications within your communication channel without having to bounce around to other systems.

Need Help Making It Happen?

Contact Mammoth Factory for more sage advice on how to use Shopify Plus, FlowLink, Slack, and more to simplify your work flow so that you can spend more time on the fun part!