E-commerce Outsourcing: Processes that Can Benefit

E-commerce stores have revolutionized the way, people browse, shop, or suggest products. Online shopping has made it easier for people to research, find and buy products from the comfort of their homes. The industry is now leveraging technologies like machine learning, augmented reality, and IoT to further improve our shopping experience.

Lenskart, India’s fastest-growing eyewear online store leverages augmented reality technology. Customers rely heavily on augmented reality setups to identify eye gears that suit them the best. Similarly, Amazon recently introduced the Dash button powered by IoT technology. One-click and you can place your order with Amazon using Dash buttons.

The need to constantly innovate leaves e-commerce platforms with no time to concentrate on other important tasks. Since stores are juggling between too many processes with limited resources at hand, problems like duplicate content, brand interference, and product returns have popped up.

Must Read: Processes Every Growing Start-up Should Consider Outsourcing

E-commerce statistics that paint a scary picture are:

One out of three products ordered online are returned
22% of returns occur because wrong products were delivered
Brand interference leads to seller churn and 1% of seller churn can impact revenues heavily.

Outsourcing is often leveraged as a cost-cutting methodology but it also doubles as the best instrument for acquiring subject matter expertise. Outsourcing to an experienced player can enhance productivity and impact output.

By outsourcing projects that require industry expertise, e-commerce businesses can control the varied pain points. Outsourcing will help e-commerce platforms leverage the expertise from multiple industries to create a positive impact on customers’ journey.

Table of Contents

E-commerce Functions that can be outsourced

1. Listing, Optimization, and Catalog Management

Myntra, a leading Indian lifestyle e-commerce store alone has over 200K products. Imagine the plight of listing, optimizing, and managing these 200K SKUs. The ever-changing dynamics of the modern times we live in often coax employees to enrich catalogs. Such enrichments are done to improve on-site search, create theme-based bucketing, and offer better recommendations.

Outsourcing catalog creation and management will benefit e-commerce stores in many ways including:

With expert writers creating product descriptions, e-commerce stores can aim for higher conversion.
Professional data entry experts can assist achieve higher accuracy for attribute values.
Industry experts can always cross-verify all attribute values, product highlights ensuring correct labeling of all products.

How does it work?

Step 1: The first step towards creating a quality catalog involves content writing, all product descriptions must be written in a way that highlights the USPs of the product. The writing needs to be fresh and convincing.

Step 2: Once the product descriptions are ready, a team must verify them to ensure no fake products or information is listed.

Step 3: Once the descriptions are checked, a professional cross-verifies all the images submitted.

Step 4: Once the catalog passes the soft quality check

Step 5: The catalog is often visited to process enrichment requests by sellers or marketplaces.

Services e-commerce stores can outsource for proper creation and maintenance of catalog:

Catalog creation
Content writing
Catalog quality check
Catalog enrichment

2. Seller Onboarding

Finding sellers who can bring with themselves a new set of the assortment is tough and requires rigorous attempts. By outsourcing seller onboarding to an industry, an expert can help e-commerce platforms onboard experienced sellers hassle-free.

Seller onboarding service providers often rely on competitor benchmarking for identifying sellers with multiple products. The first step towards finding the right seller involves identifying products that are popular but missing on the platform. Relying on search queries made by customers can prove to be beneficial in identifying products that are missing.

How outsourcing seller acquisition and sourcing processes can help?

BPO companies have developed a paradigm where they rely on competitor benchmarking for finding sellers and manufacturers. They benchmark your store against the competitors and discover sellers who can sell missing products.

Similarly, they use social media analytics to discover sellers who are promoting products that are missing from your store. The combination of analytics and benchmarking capabilities helps you find the right manufacturer and seller for your platform.

Watch this Real Time with MK Episode to discover the impact of E-commerce Outsourcing

3. Product Photography

Adding images from multiple angles is one of the most iterated best practices of catalog management. If e-commerce platforms start building in-house teams for product photography, they will run out of space for storing products. Clicking multiple images of a product from multiple angles will require a huge workforce.

Building an in-house team of photographers will require e-commerce platforms to invest in infrastructure and HR professionals to furnish their tax liabilities and pension details. Outsourcing product photography can help e-commerce stores make it easier for them to manage the growing requirement.

4. Sourcing & Manufacturing

Sourcing & Manufacturing is tough and hard to do. While it is easier to find a manufacturer, managing them on a day-to-day basis is tough. E-commerce platforms need to work on customer experience improvement hence outsourcing sourcing & manufacturing processes makes sense.

E-commerce platforms can outsource sourcing and manufacturing processes to industry leaders and build a strong array of manufacturers. Relying on industry experts has got additional benefits like:

Onboarding experienced manufacturers who have collaborated with established enterprises.
Getting all the documentation done effectively to avoid all kinds of legal hassles.

5. Fulfillment and Returns

66% of the top 10,000 Amazon sellers use “Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA)”. Now imagine, Amazon managing a fleet of vehicles responsible for procuring packages from sellers and depositing them at Amazon’s warehouse. It is basically like Amazon running an in-house Uber.

No matter if you are small or as big a platform as Amazon, you must outsource these “fulfillment and return pickups” to focus on core processes. By outsourcing the transport wing to an industry expert, e-commerce platforms can ensure timely and safe transit of packages to and fro.

How outsourcing fulfillment and return helps e-commerce grow?

Outsourcing entire logistics to an industry leader will help e-commerce platforms streamline their product delivery. Benefits of outsourcing fulfillment and return:

Outsourcing will also bring in the requisite efficiency and e-commerce platforms won’t be dependent on the seller’s mercy for shipping products on time.
Facilitate easier returns, which involves one-to-one pickups.
Offer faster delivery options

6. Customer Service

51% of customers are not willing to do business with a company after just one bad experience. While the cost of customer acquisition is rising the overall customer lifetime value is dipping. Quality customer service is the difference you can leverage to leap ahead of your competitors.

Offering quality customer service requires an intricate understanding of varied metrics like NPS, CSAT, and Churn Rate. Outsourcing customer service to industry expertise will usher the enterprise towards success. With customer service experts handling all communications on varied channels like email, chat, social media, and phone, e-commerce platforms can focus on procurement and delivery.

Outsourced customer service guarantees a few things including

Improved CSAT Score
Positive impact on Customer Effort Score
Addresses concerns leading to customer churn

Benefits of E-commerce Call Center Outsourcing?

Affordable inbound and outbound call center outsourcing service providers in India are enabling e-commerce stores to offer quality support to their end-users. These outsourcing companies have a pool of talented employees working on efficient technologies to ensure improved customer satisfaction. All best customer service outsourcing companies for e-commerce store guarantees a set of metric improvement. By measuring, benchmarking, and improvising on these metrics like NPS, CSAT, CES, AHT, and FCR, e-commerce customer service can be improved dynamically.

Some of the underrated benefits of call center outsourcing for e-commerce include

Easier onboarding for sellers
Quick resolution for payment-related and product-related queries
Improved product discovery
Reduction in Customer effort score

7. Competitive Intelligence

The entry of new players has turned the e-commerce landscape into a battle-ground. E-commerce players filled with investors’ money are willing to spend heavily on customer acquisition. With the cost of acquisition going up, established players need to play smartly.

By leveraging competitive intelligence, e-commerce marketplaces can reach users directly and generate curiosity toward their platform and products. Be it seller acquisition, increasing breadth of assortments, or discovering popular products, competitor benchmarking and social media analytics are the two most effective methodologies. If e-commerce stores start focusing on building an in-house team of competitive intelligence, they will have to compromise on varied other fronts.

Outsourcing competitive intelligence to BPOs that leverage the power of e-commerce analytics to boost conversions and reduce pain points seems legit. Outsourcing not only saves the organization from building a team but also helps them access industrial expertise at an affordable price.

Common concerns with Outsourcing & Solutions

Trust issues: E-commerce is a nascent industry, handing over confidential data to third-party poses serious threats. The importance of these data is so high that it can jeopardize the future of the platform if hacked.

Solution: Get in partnership with an enterprise that has furnished the requirements for compliances like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS. The certification ensures that the enterprise follows standard practices and abides by data privacy norms. Look for ISO 27001 Certification when outsourcing processes.

Vulnerable to quality control: The E-commerce industry is so popular because it has solved a very muscular problem. Now industry experts are vulnerable to quality control, they believe outsourcing will impact the quality of output.

Solution: In 2020, Tailored Outsourcing is one of the biggest BPO trends. Through tailored outsourcing, BPO enterprises are building a team of subject matter experts headed by industry leaders. Such teams are well-versed with the industry practices and are experts at problem-solving.

Loss of control: Businesses believe the “outsourcing process will reduce our control over the process”. Since the e-commerce landscape is quite unpredictable, businesses want to be in control when something goes wrong.

Solution: “Loss of Control is an advantage”. Yes! By letting BPOs with experienced industry players handling the processes, e-commerce platforms can be sure that they will manage every solution. BPOs often leverage new technologies to solve problems.

What is the Role of BPO in E-commerce?

Today, BPOs are the center of excellence. The growth of e-commerce outsourcing in India has pushed this BPOs to develop new skills and onboard new technology to ensure effective solutions for end-users. With the increasing reliance of e-businesses on outsourcing, BPOs are diverting into new technologies and building a state-of-the-art infrastructure.

Popular E-commerce Outsourcing Services

With reliable outsourced e-commerce solution providers, marketplaces can automate processes like content writing, catalog management, and catalog enrichment. With processes running on automatic mode, key stakeholders can devote more time to important tasks and focus on innovation.

Final Thoughts on Benefits of E-commerce Outsourcing

Companies often go out of business because of focusing too much on competitors instead of improving their own services. The E-commerce industry is going through a phase, where multiple new entrants are changing the rules of the game. Established industry players need to cope up with the changes to remain relevant.

With experienced e-commerce outsourcing companies like MattsenKumar, which has supported leading e-commerce marketplaces from India in effectively manage catalog creation, catalog quality check, and buyer-seller management, online stores can gain momentum. Outsourcing the e-commerce process is a tricky situation but with an e-commerce outsourcing company that fulfills varied compliances and certification norms, stores can ensure the safety of user-data.

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