The online commerce sector must have been one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States over the past 10 years, showing a revenue growth of at least 146.2%. But that’s no news to anyone.
And the reason for this is that, on top of everything, we are consumers too and have experienced (and fallen in love with) the convenience of buying anything with a click from the comfort of our homes and often receiving it on the same day.
Many technological advancements have converged into a largely digitized society that can fulfill almost all its demands through smartphones, and this is amazing for the industry as a whole and for those who have had the privilege of witnessing this technological and behavioral transition.
In these same past 10 years, we have been side by side with ecommerce businesses of all sizes, helping them better structure their operations, and we have learned a lot by observing their day-to-day operations.
At the same time, while we were in the trenches with visionary entrepreneurs who managed to take advantage of this industry growth, we observed competition increasing exponentially and with it, new challenges emerging.
And the truth is that being the first or the best is no guarantee of success in ecommerce, as the barriers of entry for new competitors decrease every day.
Just a few years ago, having a domain on the internet, some products, a credit card, and a Facebook Ads account was enough for double-digit returns for every dollar invested. Those were the “online UTMs time”. But that’s no longer guaranteed for the vast majority of digital businesses.
There’s a parable that speaks about an auction for a dollar bill.
This parable speaks about the subjective value of things and how people’s perceptions can influence their financial judgments. Here’s the story:
In an auction, an auctioneer puts a dollar bill up for auction. He starts by asking for one dollar for the ticket. The people present begin to bid, but these are not normal bids. The auctioneer starts receiving bids much higher than the value of the dollar bill itself.
The fable highlights how the perceived value of something can surpass its intrinsic value, especially when people are moved by emotion, competition, or the desire to win. This reflects the dynamics of financial markets, where prices are often determined by investor psychology as well as supply and demand.
Imagine that the ecommerce market in the United States is like the auction for the dollar bill, where the dollar bill represents the potential market of consumers.
Each ecommerce is like one of the bids in the auction, trying to offer something unique and attractive to these consumers.
Initially, the market starts with a basic level of competition, where product prices are relatively balanced. Just like in the auction, the perceived value of each ecommerce product is quite clear and reasonable.
However, as more ecommerces enter the fray, competition intensifies.
Just like in the auction, this growing competition can lead ecommerces to offer increasingly aggressive discounts to attract customers. For example, they may lower their prices, offer free shipping, or launch aggressive and constant promotions.
However, just like the bids in the auction, these offers may start to exceed the actual value of the product margin offered. Ecommerces may end up sacrificing their profitability and financial health to compete in this fierce environment.
As a result, some businesses may find themselves in a difficult situation, where they are spending more to acquire customers than they are earning from sales.
This can lead to reduced profit margins, financial difficulties, and even bankruptcies, especially for those who cannot differentiate themselves enough in the market.
This analysis illustrates how high competition in the ecommerce market in the United States can negatively impact the financial health of its players, just as the distorted perception of value in the auction for the dollar bill can lead to irrationally high bids.
And this is the big problem we’ve identified that we want to help solve.
How We’ll Help The Industry Thrive
By thoroughly understanding all the daily challenges that ecommerce management teams face in their operations, we have developed a methodology over the past decade that:
- Provides essential ecommerce operation management data.
- With this data, managers can make more assertive and faster decisions.
- And with that, they can better focus their time on “putting out the fires” that arise daily in their operations.
In short, we have created an app that will be the growth map for ecommerce businesses, collecting multi-platform data and condensing it into an unique “management cockpit” that is easy to interpret and understand.
Our Focus On An Uncomplicated Experience
In our initial version of the app (that will be soon available by the time of this post), we focused on creating a very simplified experience for our users because we tirelessly analyzed our competitors and realized that, besides not providing the intelligence data we have, their users complain a lot about the onboarding process and difficulties in understanding the metrics and data.
With that in mind, we developed a process of ultra-simplified onboarding steps that provide essential data with minimal effort from the user who can, as interested, expand the degree of data assertiveness and metrics including more information along the way and thus our model already generates even more assertive and valuable insights.
Now I’ll break down in detail the roadmap of features we will provide to our users worldwide.
SmarSeller Version 1.0
Our MVP was designed to provide the essentials, as quickly as possible, to add upgrades and additional tools on top of these key features that will further enrich the data and insights, as well as maximize the perceived value by our users.
Among the features that will already be available in Version 1.0 of the app, we will have:
Simplified Profitability Analysis
We demystify and uncomplicate profitability analysis, providing it in a dashboard that highlights the main variables that directly impact the profitability of our users’ ecommerce businesses.
In this way, our clients will have a quick and assertive view of the points they need to focus on and will have clear KPIs of goals that must be followed to achieve attractive profit.
This functionality will be, above all, a profitability map for ecommerce managers of any size.
Inventory Analysis
In this functionality, we start from the premise that the goal of an ecommerce store is to understand the demand for its product and deliver more of what the consumer wants.
And for that, our Inventory Intelligence feature provides all the essential data for the ecommerce manager to easily identify which products have the most positive impact on their operation and which ones can be discontinued to bring more efficiency to the business as a whole.
In addition, we break down in detail the purchasing behavior of customers for each SKU sold to bring insights that can be translated into more profitable marketing campaigns and more satisfying returns (and customers).
I believe that Inventory Intelligence is one of the most interesting features of our initial version and has the greatest potential for constant improvements in terms of data intelligence from the new features that are planned.
Smart Insights
Smart Insights is where we translate essential information from ecommerce operations into direct-to-the-point insights to serve as a guide to our users for creating better campaigns, offers, and strategic planning.
Among the features available in Version 1.0 of the SmartSeller app, we will have a detailed analysis of customer cohorts that result in valuable insights about behavior, growth potential, and mainly, a greater understanding of the ideal consumer demand for each ecommerce.
Uncomplicated Expenses And Costs Management
Expense and cost management is always a challenge for companies of all sizes, but still essential for growth planning, cash flow projections, among others.
Therefore, in the initial version of our app, we will provide a simplified panel for viewing and managing fixed expenses and variable costs of ecommerce businesses, all of that inside the app.
Thinking about a better experience for our users, the client can manually enter their data and monthly updates inside the app or include the information in bulk via a standard .xlsx file.
To further improve this functionality, among the planned short-term upgrades, we will have integrations with accounting management systems, such as QuickBooks and similars.
New Features And Future Upgrades
Our main focus is to simplify the management of our clients’ ecommerce businesses and we seek to do this collaboratively with our customers. Although we already have a roadmap of new features planned, we will always be seeking what our users really want and need.
In summary, among the updates already planned in our roadmap, I highlight:
- New Integrations: we will have more integrations with advertising platforms, such as Meta and Google Ads; other sales channels, such as Amazon; analytical platforms, like GA4; accounting tools, such as QuickBooks and banking services.
- New features: we will have new features, such as an innovative and super-detailed forecast tool; we will enhance the expense management tool with even more in-depth and simplified graphics and data; we will have detailed analysis of different sales channels, such as marketplaces; we will provide the possibility of customizing and exporting reports and an integration with AI (detailed below).
- New tools: we will provide complementary tools that will be supercharged with the information that will be provided via the dashboard so that SmartSeller becomes more and more a growth assistant for our clients. Among the tools, we will have Offer Planners, Intelligent Pricing Tools, and Forecast tools. Also, as we get more users, we’ll be providing industry benchmarks and allow our customers to compare their own results to other players from the same niche.
- Artificial intelligence: we will integrate with artificial intelligence to condense even more data via chat/prompts to provide even better insights, strategies, and complementary information from the real data of our users, becoming an extension of the brains of our clients.
Why Acquire The Unlimited Plan Today?
All users will have access to the same features at this initial phase, however, to celebrate our launch, we have created a plan called Unlimited that will be available for a limited time and whoever subscribes it will have access to all new features at no additional cost, in addition to that, Unlimited Subscribers will have 1 hour per month Zoom call with our experts in the first 3 months of subscription.
Access to future features is very important for early users because for each new group of features we launch, we plan to create different subscription plans and because of that, Unlimited users will be saving a lot of money and receiving in return much additional value to their apps.
Final takeaway
We want to revolutionize the ecommerce industry by making it more efficient and profitable and I count on your help for this mission.
I would love to receive your feedback. Feel free to email me anytime: cassio@smartseller.tech.