The Drawbacks of Hiring an Internal E-Commerce Team

Selling on Amazon is a long and winding road. For every sales win, there are hours of planning and strategy that went into creating just the right product listing – not to mention the logistics and fulfillment side of things. When brands start thinking about taking the leap into the e-commerce world, it’s tempting to want to build up an internal team to take the reins on an e-commerce strategy. Unfortunately, it takes substantial time, resources, and education to fully execute a successful e-commerce program. In this post, we’ll discuss a few of those drawbacks as well as provide some other ways to efficiently get the ball rolling in the e-commerce world.

First, in order to get the most out of the Amazon marketplace, brands need a well-staffed, competent team to manage the entire online sales process. This means everyone from front-end marketers that create Amazon product listings, write product descriptions, and handle advertising, to end-of-the-road customer service reps who deal with any consumer issues, questions, or complaints. Hiring a team of this magnitude – no matter how large your organization is – requires a significant financial investment. On top of salaries and benefits, all of these new team members must quickly get up-to-speed on messaging and brand identity – there can be no slow and easy onboarding process.

Next, a critical addition to the above-mentioned e-commerce team is fulfillment. Once an order is placed online, the real work for a brand begins. From packaging and shipping to processing returns, a streamlined logistics process is a must. This also means having the right space to manage the actual product fulfillment. While Amazon may seem like a well-oiled machine from the outside, as a seller, it can get messy – and fast. Brands have to continuously check product listings to ensure they’re updated, monitor third party sellers to check MAP policy adherence, and stay on top of the myriad of fees charged by Amazon. For an e-commerce strategy to run smoothly, the tracking and management portion alone requires one or two dedicated people, resulting in yet another resource to be filled by management.

A final drawback to an internal e-commerce team is the amount of tracking and hands-on management that is involved. Instead of building an expensive internal e-commerce team, brands can work with a single seller partner to ensure maximum e-commerce success without a high price tag. Single seller partners purchase products directly from the brand, becoming the new ‘seller’ and consuming full responsibility for all of the marketing, strategy, fulfillment, and analytics. Relevant feedback is passed back to the brand, creating a holistic, full-circle e-commerce process that doesn’t require any extra resource hires, warehouse space, or manual data gathering.

If your brand is ready to enter the e-commerce game but aren’t excited about the prospect of additional overhead costs, let SupplyKick be your trusted third party seller. Get started with SupplyKick now!