5 Moves E-commerce Entrepreneurs Need To Steal In 2023

It is the time of the year for entrepreneurs to slow down and craft winning moves for their businesses.

Exhaustion from the previous year may leaves you in a blank state, not knowing what to do next. I’ve been there before so I know exactly how that feels. 

I have put together 5 key things every entrepreneur must do to conquer 2023 by storm.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in!

1. Reflect On The Entire Year

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward’’.  Steve Jobs

As much as it seems like the obvious thing to do, less than 2% of entrepreneurs get to block out certain time to reflect on their lives and businesses.

The idea of reflection sounds like a fairytale. Your typical day is flooded with over 1000 DM requests, and struggles with competitors for the same dollar in Cynthia’s pocket, not to mention 70 plus orders on your website that customers can’t wait to get.

There are just so many moving parts, and there is barely one minute you can afford to take a step aside and keep your head anyway cool. 

Crazy, right?

But here’s the cold hard truth, “you cannot connect the dots forward, you can only connect them backwards". Moments of reflection allow you to take a step back and look at the year in hindsight, reflect on how it went, celebrate your wins, and correct your blunders.

I can go all day writing an endless Ode about the efficacy of reflection, however: 

Here are 5 key areas you can reflect on Before 2023.

1. Highlights: What were your best memories & accomplishments? Be thankful for the Range rover sport you bought, the office space you built, the capital you raised and
2. Disappointments: What were your failures, setbacks, and wasted opportunities? The staff that stole from you, the one that left you, the customers that dumped you, the partner that cheated on you!
3. Game Changers: What was your Midas touch? What was the one thing that propelled your trajectory for the year?
4. Focus: Ask yourself, what were the things you spent most of your time working on? ruminate strategies adopted, tactics deployed, and the market segment you focused on.
5. Shot’s Missed: Reflect on the deals you passed, the skills you ditched, and the decisions you procrastinated.

The list is endless, but these 5 key areas are enough for you to gain a fresh perspective ahead of 2023.

2. Review Customer Feedback

“Customers are your co-founders” Elon Jobs 

Essentially, Customer feedback refers to the information clients provide about whether they are satisfied or dissatisfied with a product or service and about their general experience with your brand. Sometimes they are more than reviews, they are opinions and suggestions they believe will make you serve them better. 

Customers' feedback can be collected with surveys (prompted feedback). Also, you can also find opinions and reviews your clients post online (unprompted feedback) and collect them using Internet monitoring tools. Whichever way you get the feedback from the customers, what is more, important is that it gives you a complete picture of customers' perception of your brand. 

Remember, customers are your co-founders and their feedback are goldmines. Loop through their complaints, and testimonials to analyze their opinions about your brand throughout 2022. Fix your blind spots, and improve greatly on what the customers love. 

Here’s the bottom line, if you ever want your brand to scale as quickly as possible, you can’t survive without customer feedback!

3. Measure What Matters

“What you don’t track, you lose track”. Elon Jobs

First, know your metrics!

Metrics give you insight into what’s causing your business outcomes. Ensure your strategic thinking and decision-making are not based on assumptions and speculation.

Spell out what your key performance indicators (KPIs) are. 

The following are the 5 most important eCommerce metrics you should be tracking:

1. AOV -Average Order Value 

Average order value (AOV) tracks the average dollar amount spent each time a customer purchases a product from you.

To calculate, follow the formula: AOV = Total Revenue / Total Number of Orders.

2. CLV -Customer Life Time Value 

CLV tracks the total revenue your business could expect from a single customer throughout their lifetime (or at least the lifetime of their relationship with your business)

To calculate CLV: Use the formula: 

CLV = Average Value of a Purchase x # of Times the Customer Will Buy Each Year x Average Length of the Customer Relationship (in Years)

3. CAC- Customer Acquisition Costs 

CAC refers to your customer acquisition costs (CAC). It reveals your typical cost of acquiring a new customer.

To calculate CAC: Use the formula:

Marketing Expenditure / Number of New Customers

4. CAR -Cart Abandonment Rate 

No matter how high your conversion rate or how popular your products are, some customers will simply abandon their purchase for some reason or the other. This is referred to as the cart abandonment rate

To calculate CLV: Use the formula:

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate = (# of Completed Purchases / # of Shopping Carts Created) x 100

5. Net promoter score

Net Promoter Score NPS is a metric that measures the likelihood of a customer recommending your brand to their personal and professional social circle. The higher your NPS, the higher the chance that your customers will turn into active Promoters and enthusiastic advocates for your products.

To calculate CLV: Use the formula:

NPS = % of Promoters — % of Detractors

With this approach, you will be thinking strategically and making decisions based on hard numbers and facts and not head knowledge.

it’s time to take stock of the year.

4. Retreat

All work and no rest make you a dull CEO. Anonymous

According to a recent survey of small business owners, 42% of respondents report experiencing burnout, especially after navigating entrepreneurship through two years of a pandemic. In fact, 53% of business owners say burnout hinders them from succeeding in their business.

I feel your plight!

You’re stressed, frustrated, and feeling run down. Your body and mind are telling you that it’s time to take a break ASAP if there’s any hope of avoiding burnout.

You need a break ASAP — and you deserve one. Here’s how to take a break from your business without things falling apart while you’re gone.

You need a vacation, like, yesterday.

But as a small business owner, it often feels like your business is your whole world — and if you were to take some time away, you’re worried that everything would burn to the ground in your absence.

Here’s how to take a well-deserved break from your business, without running out of business:

1. Automate Your Business:

The purpose of wealth is Freedom! -Naval Ravikant

Before you go on a break, you must, first of all, put your house in order. You must ensure the 3 cardinals of your business are automated. 

With eCommerce website platforms like Kitcart, you can ensure that you:

1. Set Your ‘’Sales’’ On Autopilot: With Kitcart you can sell in over 196 countries of the world without losing sleep. Once customers discover your website from an ad on social media, or through a simple search on google, get to receive both local and international customers get to pay for your products with ease.
2. Ship Orders Seamlessly: Thanks to Kitcart, you no longer have to do some quadratic equations to calculate shipping fees for each order. Leave that job to Kitcart. With the help of the Kitcart shipping addon, your website automatically calculates real-time weight-based shipping from your shipping partners automatically.
3. Communicate With A Pushbutton: The good news is this, you don’t have to call each of the customers one by one! All you have to do is to have an automated email sequence set up on your Kitcart dashboard with several special upcoming sales announcements and personalized tips to them back to back.

 Enjoy Your Vacation

It’s one thing for you to schedule a break, it’s another thing to enjoy it. If you are not careful, in a short time you would have turned the vacation into a mini office. Most entrepreneurs fall for this trap.

My one cent is this, ensure you truly take your break. Ensure to do your best to unplug.

Pro tip: Jet a trip to Maldives, Seychelles, or Paris. Go somewhere you can renew your strength for the year ahead.

5. Restrategize

‘’Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’’ Albert Einstein

The remaining days of the year present you with another opportunity to approach 2023 with a different perspective. Remember the old age that says: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Ensure to draft out a business plan, set new smart goals, and achieve them in the year ahead.

Here are 3 sure ways you can plan ahead for 2023

1. Draft A Business Plan Ahead of 2023

Oftentimes when I talk to entrepreneurs about why they need to draft a business plan for their business, I often hear them say stuff like Writing a business plan sucks! ‘’You learn to ride a whale by riding a whale’’? however, as much as this sounds fanciful to every entrepreneur, the necessity of a business plan cannot be overemphasized. Benjamin Franklin once said If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. This is also true for running a business that can scale.

Business plans are like road maps: it’s possible to travel without one, but that will only increase the odds of getting lost along the way. Writing a business plan helps you see the world the way it is, you merge your obsession with reality. Ensure to draft one ahead of the new year.

In case you need a step-by-step guide that details how to create a killer business plan for your business. I did justice to it in one of our previous blog posts. 

You can read the full guide here.

2. Expand Your Contacts

Expanding your network of business contacts is one strategic way to increase your odds of business success in 2023. It’s a great way to never run out of customers, generate fresh ideas, and put you in contact with financial partners, suppliers, and advisors. 

The good part is this, the benefits compound — each new person in your network brings along their own network too. No doubt, expanding your network of contacts in 2023 has the potential of being one of your greatest assets.

3. Adopt New Marketing Channels

When asked how he was so good at scoring goals, Wayne Gretzky — the greatest hockey player of all time — said, “I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. 

It seems like such an obvious concept. But if it was only that easy, everyone would be doing it.

The sentiment of Gretzky’s comment maps extremely well to business. The tide of customer attention and product discovery had evolved greatly. 

TVs no longer have their glue, Tiktok is fast taking over. Your job as an entrepreneur is not to fight the changing tides, but to spread your tentacles across all channels. 

Gaining attention and growing your brand in an extremely competitive world can be a real struggle. However, taking advantage of the fantastic opportunities that other marketing channels have to offer could be the solution for your business.

Takeaways     

I know some of you skipped to the bottom of the article. 

To recap:

Reflecting on the outgoing year, celebrating the wins, and fixing our blindspots are largely the most underrated ways to gain a thorough perspective into the new year.

Customers are your co-founders and their feedback are goldmines.

Measure what matters, Know your metrics, What you don’t track, you lose track.

It’s high time you obey the body's clarion call. Take a break! 

Go into the new year with a fresh strategy, and new insights to dominate the year.

Finally, Entrepreneurs should set their houses in order ahead of 2023 and be prepared to take on new phases of challenges that come with the new year. and following the five key steps highlighted above, 2023 will definitely be a walk-over.

I Can’t wait to see you dominate 2023! 

Feel free to drop your comments to share what you learned from this article.