6 Must Do Daily Actions in Ecommerce

Even though I would consider myself as a seasoned business owner, I am still vulnerable to making some simple, albeit really stupid business mistakes. In fact, I estimate that every week I loose at least couple of hours doing things that aren’t necessary to my business.

The problem is, sometimes I just don’t know what these things are.

Running an ecommerce store is not easy, especially if you do it on your own. There is an abundance of tasks you need to do to make sure that everything runs smoothly. There is the site you need to manage, customers to please, orders to fulfil, accounts to keep and much more.

This gets even more problematic if you run your store on a side of a full time job. Your time is even more limited then and your attention divided between other things.

As a result, it’s easy to get bogged down into tasks that really don’t mean that much to your store while leaving the really important stuff undone.

To help you avoid making that mistake I prepared a short list of absolute must do ecommerce tasks you need to do every day.

I have to stress that this is quite subjective list coming from my personal experience. If yours is different, let me know about it in the comments below.

My Personal Must Do Daily Activities in Ecommerce

Building Traffic

Traffic is a lifeblood of any ecommerce store. Without customers coming to your site, you will have no orders and your site will ultimately fail.

Therefore, your first objective should be to ensure that you have a constant, and diverse, traffic to your site.

You can do this by implementing various SEO strategies, managing your PPC campaigns, updating social media accounts, sending email newsletters and more, depending on what sources of traffic you are focusing on.

You don’t need to work on all of them every day but make sure that at least one task on your list helps you drive more traffic to the site.

Why Do It Daily? If you start building traffic when the number of visitors to your site goes low, you are already too late. Just like in sales, you should build traffic everyday. Even if you make small steps forward, it will all matter in a long run.

Customer Service

The quality of your customer service is strictly related to two other factors in your business: word of mouth and repeat purchase.

Provide a bad customers service and customer not only will refuse to come back to your store but also tell everyone they know about their bad experience.

Therefore make sure that you respond to customer enquiries promptly, ideally the same day and help them out with their problems.

Why Do It Daily? Customers need your attention everyday. They will ring you with questions, inquiries or complaints. You will also have to ring them to update them on the progress of the order, or to inform about changes in product availability and much more.

By doing so, you will create a positive and professional image of your business.

Stock Management

The level of stock you carry changes everyday. Even if you don’t make sales every day of the week, the stock your manufacturers carry will change daily. This is especially important if you run a drop shipping business and carry no stock yourself.

It is then vital that you keep it up to date on your website as much as you can to avoid having customers purchase out of stock items.

Why Do It Daily? To keep an up to date stock information on the site and prevent having customers trying to purchase an item that’s out of stock or discontinued.

Site Updates

A good site changes often. From the home page, product availability information to blog, your customers should see some life over there.

Those changes don’t have to be big. They can be as simple as changing rotating banners every week, or when you have something new to announce to your audience or publishing a new blog post.

None of these things have to be done everyday but you could schedule particular tasks for each day of the week to have the website constantly expanding.

Why Do It Daily? To keep the site fresh and full of life. Also, working on a site everyday will make you more aware of what other things you could do with your business (new promotions etc.)

Monitoring KPIs

The only way to ensure your business runs smoothly is by observing how it performs. You can do this by selecting and regularly monitoring your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Why Do It Daily? Apart from monitoring your online stores performance, KPIs can reveal when there is a problem with your site. And as with anything else, the quicker you identify a problem, the faster you will be able to bring everything back to normal (or even improve it).

Social Media Updates

Lastly, you should update your social media accounts at least once a day. I am a huge proponent of having only one or two social media accounts for your business, the ones that offer the most value. And if that’s the case, sending one update a day to each isn’t going to be much of a problem.

Why Do It Daily? To show that your company is active, create an impression that you operate daily and also to slowly build some form of customer engagement.

What If You Run a Drop Shipping Business On a Side

I get asked this question a lot, “what if I run a drop shipping business on a side and can’t dedicate my entire day to it?”

My answer if usually quite simple (and mind you, I run a drop shipping business on a side as well). Even if you run your store on a side, and the idea is that you do not want (or can’t) spend too much time on it, there are still tasks you should be doing everyday to ensure it’s growth.

Of course, because of less time you have, you can’t do every little thing a full time store owner does. Having said that, you should try to at least do the basic activities I highlighted above, even if not daily then perhaps stretch them to a week?

Spend one evening working on SEO or other traffic source, another managing stock and updating the site and another updating and managing your social media accounts (you could even schedule some updates to ensure that something gets posted there every day).

The only activities I would recommend you still perform daily are monitoring KPIs, to be able to spot any problems with your site and stock management (because you really don’t want customers to order products that are out of stock, do you?).

Your Turn

What activities you think are crucial for running an ecommerce store and should be done daily? Let us know in the comments.

Tagged dropshipping