The world of eCommerce is still fertile ground for rapid growth. Doubling or even 10Xing growth in a few short years is a reality for many brands. While explosive growth is a great problem to have, it does come with challenges.
Rapid growth often leads to underdeveloped operations, which can hinder profitability and scalability. In trying to reach the next level, retailers often run into challenges like:
- Fragmented data. With reporting scattered across platforms, it’s hard to parse out meaningful insights, causing delays in decision-making.
- Inefficient pricing strategies. Without a consistent pricing framework, staying competitive and profitable can feel impossible.
- Complex marketing operations. Managing marketing channels manually is time consuming and opens your campaigns to human error and wasted ad spend.
In this article, we’re digging into the daily pricing and marketing strategies that drive profitability business-wide. Let’s get started.
4 Ways to Streamline Operations and Grow Your Margins
In eCommerce, retail operations include a wide variety of activities involved in running your online business. This can encompass everything from managing product listings, inventory management systems, fulfillment and logistics, and customer experience.
But for many brands, pricing, marketing, and reporting are just as critical. Here are four strategies to help you streamline your operations and grow your margins.
1. Futureproof Your Pricing Strategy
In competitive marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, it’s vital to develop pricing strategies that are both proactive and adaptive. The tides can change in an instant, and one small ripple can have a big impact on the effectiveness of your pricing and the strength of your margins. As demand, competition, and marketplace fees shift, brands must have their fingers on the pulse of their pricing at all times.
A sustainable pricing strategy incorporates predictive analytics. Tools that analyze market dynamics and customer behavior give you the foresight to adjust prices proactively rather than reactively.
📍 Pricing pro tips:
- Monitor pricing elasticity and sensitivity. Understand how price changes affect demand and incorporate this context into your pricing strategy.
- Use pricing automation tools. AI-driven tech can help you identify pricing opportunities within your niche.
- Experiment with pricing strategies. Split test different strategies to determine what drives profitability.
- Ensure MAP compliance. Use automated systems to comply with minimum advertised price (MAP) policies across marketplaces.
One of the best ways to futureproof your pricing is to implement a dynamic pricing system that quickly responds to market shifts. This approach incorporates many different variables to find the optimal prices for your products based on your goals.
“For dynamic pricing to work effectively, you need to consider all these things,” explains Ali Babul, Chief Evangelist at Trellis. “It’s getting your price elasticity of demand, your profit sensitivity, and charting those pieces out and making sure that you’re defining what your strategy is. Am I going after more cash flow? Am I going after more units sold? Understanding these points for your business will be super powerful.”
How elastic are prices in your product categories? Find out now with our free Amazon Price Elasticity of Demand Calculator.
2. Use Business Discounts Strategically
In eCommerce, every decision influences your bottom line, including how you handle business discounts. Done strategically, reducing your markup on fast-selling products can be an effective way to increase profits.
Taking the calculated risk to reduce margins in high-volume wholesale channels like Amazon Business can lower product costs and increase profitability on more lucrative DTC channels. The key is balancing this strategy with your high-level pricing and sales goals.
📍 Business discounting pro tips:
- Use tiered pricing. Offer volume-based discounts. E.g. Provide a 5% discount for orders over 50 units and a 10% discount for orders over 200 units.
- Offer bundles. Provide discounted pricing on bundled products. E.g. Package a printer, paper, and ink together for a reduced rate.
- Optimize pricing with data. Adjust your discount strategies based on product performance, competitive pricing, and market trends.
Business discounts can be a great way to increase your AOV and introduce customers to more of your products via bundles. However, you must closely monitor these tactics to make sure they’re still serving your business goals and not eroding margins unnecessarily.
3. Automate and Optimize Your Marketing
Experienced sellers know that each product and channel plays a different and vital role in your brand’s broader ecosystem. Maybe you’re selling on Walmart to diversify your sales volume. Perhaps Amazon Business is helping you reduce product costs so you can grow margins on other channels.
Whatever your mix, the more brands, products and channels you add, the harder it becomes to make sure all your campaigns are performing like they should be.
This is where marketing automation tools become essential. Automation reduces your manual effort and lets you focus on strategic initiatives.
📍 Advertising automation pro tips:
- Set up rule-based systems. Most marketplaces let you set predefined campaign rules to stay competitive on important keywords and products. Advanced third-party tools allow you to set rules across channels for specific goals like defending the Amazon Buy Box.
- Automate bid adjustments. AI-driven tools can automatically adjust bids based on real-time data, helping you stay competitive without manually setting up and tweaking rules.
- Personalize ad content. Advanced marketing automation tools use AI to segment and dynamically target audiences with personalized product content and offers based on customer data.
These days, there are a million ways to automate your eCommerce marketing activities. But not all of them will take you where you need to go. Look for an ads platform that consolidates all your sales channels and analytics into a central location.
This is a foundational feature of Trellis—we’ve found that the ability to see everything in one place, from advertising to pricing, fuels better decision-making across the board.
To see Trellis’ AI-powered Amazon ads platform in action. Book your free demo today.
4. Centralize Your Reporting
Speaking of centralizing your data, reporting can be tricky for any seller, but for operators responsible for large client portfolios and product catalogs (looking at you, agencies), it can feel downright impossible to juggle reporting for every brand and product.
Centralized reporting can strengthen your operations and increase profitability across campaigns. It helps you prove your value to stakeholders—whether it’s your client, your executive leadership, or your investors.
Real-time access to consolidated data empowers the whole team to quickly identify trends, assess campaign performance, and make informed strategy adjustments.
📍 Efficient reporting pro tips:
- Develop real-time dashboards. Create a unified dashboard with quick, real-time insights into KPIs like sales, ad spend, ACoS, and RoAS.
- Standardize metrics across channels. Understand any reporting differences between channels and make sure your dashboard provides a true apples-to-apples comparison.
- Monitor sell-through rates to manage supply and demand, and adjust pricing to minimize the risk of stockouts.
We get it—collecting, digesting, and activating all your data is a huge task. That’s why centralizing your reporting is the key to making data-driven decisions that help you scale profitably.
“I’ve worked with lots of brands, and the efficient ones do this all the time,” says Krishna Vemulapali, Trellis Chief Product Officer. “The problem is, can you do it at scale with the pressures that brand managers or channel managers have day-to-day? It’s not that the intent isn’t there, it’s the ability to have the time to do it.”
Visualizing your key metrics in one intuitive dashboard helps you quickly identify outliers and areas for improvement—which boosts efficiency, responsiveness, and you guessed it: profitability.
Transform Your Daily Operations for Greater Profitability at Every Level
As you scale, it becomes harder and harder to continue growing without streamlined systems. But as they say, what got you here won’t get you there. To reach that next level of success, streamlining and optimizing every aspect of retail operations is crucial.
Think of it as pruning your brand garden. Like a gardener cutting away excess branches, you’re improving operational efficiency and honing data-driven strategies so that your online retail stores can grow and thrive.
In an ever-changing retail climate, Trellis acts as your precision shears—empowering you to streamline content production, optimize advertising efforts, and identify unique pricing opportunities. Want more insights to power your brand’s growth? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter, The Climb.
