– Ecommerce is a business channel that should be used as a tool for testing new products and conducting customer research.
– Retail, marketplaces, and wholesale are other channels that should be utilized in conjunction with ecommerce to drive revenue.
– Companies should actively pursue retail relationships and consider the profitability of their brand and product offerings.Leverage your ecommerce channel to test new products and gather customer research, while also actively pursuing retail relationships to drive revenue and expand your market reach.E-commerce is a business channel; it’s not the business. People who have been in this game long enough know that retail is a channel, marketplaces are a channel, wholesale is a channel, and they all need to work together to drive enough revenue for your company to be purchased. So, rather than using your e-commerce channel as the be-all-end-all in growth, you should instead leverage it to test new products and look for a breakout product-market fit success. Use it as a research tool to learn more about the people who are attracted to your brand. It’s the greatest customer research channel that literally allows you to ask your visitors questions all day, every day. Yet, very few companies use it that way. This is a good thing. It doesn’t take massive strides to do something better, but rather looking for gaps that others aren’t properly addressing and filling them. If you currently have an e-commerce-based company and you’re not actively pursuing retail relationships, start today. Margins and unit economics have never made more sense to make this switch. You should be doing them all at the same time. If you can’t get into retail, it’s time to rethink how solid your brand and product offerings really are. I’ve talked to enough businesses that have had success at this point, and nearly all of them, including brands I’ve worked with, relied heavily on retail to move product. My old company did them all in multiple regions: Apple Stores, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, etc. They were a massive growth lever. #ecommerce #marketing #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco