5. Find the Right Balance
We also recommend working with a vendor who understands the automation and self-service needs that businesses have as they scale.
As you scale your operation and transactions that you’re running through your eCommerce business, you’ll get to this law of diminishing returns with having turnkey software because it's not going to necessarily have the ability to customize and cater its workflows and functionality to what your business needs.
Therefore, it’s good practice to look at where your business will be going once it's at scale. Understand where the different milestones are for when you would need to cater your integrations and business workflows, so there are fewer manual steps and more automated steps.
It doesn’t necessarily make sense to invest in complete automation upfront. It’s a balancing act between automating and integrating everything immediately upfront versus doing everything manually. You don't want everything to be manual, but you also don't want to incur the cost of having up front integrations and automation.
For that matter, as the business grows and evolves, it becomes clear that certain things aren’t necessary. Customers don’t need or want them; they don’t add value.
But you'll discover as you scale your business that you've got to be evolving your value-add, especially around self-service and automation. And this will be physically necessary in order to provide great customer service and support.
A lot of times, businesses think that enterprise eCommerce customer service has a lot to do with providing contact with a person. Although that can be beneficial in many cases, it's actually more about having a well governed process so the user has minimal time consuming processes, which usually is anything to do with people interacting.
Therefore, to the extent that it isn’t necessary to have people interacting with the users, it’s best to set up workflows and automation where you can.
It’s a balancing act, and you have to determine what makes sense based on the value the business is adding to the marketplace.
But these are things that you want to look for in a vendor, the ability to customize the workflows for your eCommerce business.