“As a business leader in a constantly evolving industry, you can’t afford to sit back and rest. If you’re not moving forward while everyone else does, you are effectively moving backwards.”
-Benjamin Arp, Solutions Architect, Miva, Inc.

Last week, Miva Solutions Architect Benjamin Arp led a webinar on “How Successful Brands Scale Their Ecommerce Business”. In it, Benjamin—along with Director of Strategy & Solutions Philip Hansen—break down effective strategies and steps to overcome the challenges at each phase of business.

Whether you’ve just decided to sell online or you’re an industry trailblazer, knowing the challenges and strategies at your phase is essential to scale up. Get the tools and tips in this free webinar to implement the right growth strategies for your business.

In this free webinar, you will learn:

• The 3 phases of an ecommerce business
• How to identify the phase you’re in
• 3 steps to scale your ecommerce business
• Common pitfalls of each phase that could lead, and have led, to major loss
• 4 methods to drive traffic to your site
• How your choice of ecommerce platform affects ROI
• Tried-and-true strategies to increase your AOV and CLTV, and why that matters
• Success stories and challenges of industry leaders to guide your own approach
• And more!

The tools and tips meant to unlock new levels of growth are available to you today. Watch the free webinar today to scale your ecommerce business like a pro.

Your ecommerce questions, answered

You’ve watched the webinar, but you have questions of your own. Read the answers Benjamin gave to top questions from the live session below, and then contact our Solutions Architects with your questions today.

Q1: Is there any benefit to building an ecommerce solution over selling on a marketplace, like Amazon or Jet?

A1: This is a really important question for business owners with an online storefront. To answer your question, let’s first take a look at an example company: Nike.

You can buy Nike products in several retail stores—stores such as Footlocker—which Nike does not own. You can also buy Nike products on marketplaces, a lot of which are online.

But Nike chooses to sell through their own website. Why?

“When you establish an ecommerce presence, you get to control the customer experience.”
-Benjamin Arp

On Amazon, your product page will look just like everyone else’s. The recommended products beneath yours may even be your competitors’. They don’t have to be yours, because Amazon controls the entire experience.

You also typically don’t own the customer data with marketplaces. They don’t give you the opportunity to see your data or get your customers’ email addresses in order to market to them. That is Amazon’s customer, or Jet’s customer, so they will market to them as they please while you fulfill their order.

So, if you want your products to be on the shelf in someone else’s store, or on the figurative shelf of someone’s online storefront, that’s a fine business strategy. You can do that.

“However, if you want to build a brand where you can control the customer experience, all the while maintaining the margin from selling through your own platform, there is a lot of value in having your own ecommerce presence.”
-Benjamin Arp

All this to say, the ecommerce platform is one component to selling; it’s not the end-all be-all of sales channels. You have to take a holistic approach and ask:

1. “What do our customers want to buy?”, and
2. “How do I get in front of them?”

Q2: If Miva builds a custom ecommerce feature for one of our competitors, do they own that feature?

A2: If you work with Miva Pro Services, our internal agency of developers and graphic designers, to build a custom ecommerce feature, you own that intellectual property.

At Miva, we use design best practices to build innovative solutions for our clients. In building custom ecommerce features on the front-end, we have found that there is not a lot of overlap, in regards to our clients and their needs. Every business’s product data and the needs of their customers look different, even within a similar industry.

Our goal is to provide you the best possible solution to your business challenge. Even if you haven’t dreamt up the solution to yours, our Solutions Architects are here to help reimagine what is possible to scale your business.

Related: See how a custom ecommerce feature can better the customer experience and boost your competitive advantage.

Q3: You mentioned that our choice of ecommerce platform affects ROI. Why should my business choose Miva over another?

A3: Great question. Here are three, of many, reasons to choose Miva over another ecommerce platform:

1. From a platform perspective, Miva has a customizable front-end that allows you to build really immersive experiences (like the lanyard builder for IDWholesaler) without a third-party plug-in tying you down.
2. Miva is a stable and secure platform that has been around for 20 years, and continues to grow and evolve with the needs of our clients and their businesses.
3. At Miva, we have an in-house agency of designers, developers, and strategists available to you: our Pro Services team. Even if you choose not to do any dev work with us, you can still jump on the phone with a solutions consultant. We’ll take a look at where you are today and where you can go, and offer a consultative approach to grow your business from where you are today.
   1. From there, we have the ability to plan, design, and develop your vision with our award-winning, in-house Pro Services team.
   2. Or, we can recommend a certified agency partner that we know and trust to accomplish your vision.

Watch the free webinar to learn how to scale your ecommerce business like a pro. Then, contact our Solutions Architects to see how we can help you overcome the challenges where you’re at, today.