Business Strategy Consulting (Retail & E-commerce)

Retail & E-commerce Business Strategy Consulting

Historically, the word ‘strategy’ finds its etymological roots in military parlance. But the word began to be used for general, administrative, and business purposes. ‘Strategy’ is about specific solutions to specific problems or objectives. For instance, the lockdown was used as a strategy to curb the spread of the COVID pandemic. When economic activities go down in a country, its central bank reduces the lending rates as a strategy to encourage borrowings. Setting lower prices is a well-known market-entry strategy.

In business also, we need to formulate functional strategies so that the overall business system runs as intended. These functional areas include strategic plan, business development, IT, operations, finance, sales and marketing, HR, supply chain and logistics, etc. If there’s a flaw in any of the sub-systems, it will affect the functioning of the entire system.

Any professional strategy consulting company could tell you that being in retail and eCommerce business, you must define the functional strategies that will make your business model work as intended. The rising complexities in the global business environment, propelled by technology-based services, have heightened the significance of strategic management consultants.

Challenges

Lack of expertise

Every time we face any challenge or disruption, we must come up with the right strategies to address them. Sometimes these challenges are new to us, and as beginners, we may have difficulties finding an effective strategy. Say you are facing a downslide in social media engagement with your audience. The common immediate response would be to create more engaging content. However, that may not be an effective strategy without considering other factors. Did you correctly identify and define your target audience? Are you on the right platform? Is your content reaching out to your audience? Are you posting consistently and at the right time of the day? Are your competitors taking the promotional route? Your response strategy must incorporate all these factors. In this case, you must have a broad and detailed assessment of your digital marketing plan. This is where the experience and expertise of retail strategy consulting firms or eCommerce strategy consulting services could come in handy, especially for startups and SMEs.

Constraint of time

The best strategy consulting firms will vouch for speedy decision-making in business. You do not have forever to act or respond to business opportunities and threats. The decisions must be taken on time. It is only fair to assume that startups and SMEs may not have developed enough expertise to be able to quickly come up with effective business strategies in the event of capturing a business opportunity or countering any business adversity.

This constraint of time does not only arise from a lack of expertise but also because of not embracing relevant business technologies and the absence of a strong support system. Apart from personal attributes including business acumen, speedy decision-making in business calls for the presence of business IT and information systems, data analytics, business intelligence, reporting mechanisms, timely audits, robust processes, use of automation, etc.

Technology deprivation

Even if you carry the expertise and timeliness for the right decision-making, your business strategies will remain severely impaired if you do not have or have access to advanced business systems and technologies in place. When the COVID pandemic struck, traditional retailers, despite knowing that going digital would be the right strategy could not implement the same because they did not have the relevant technological platform. Retailers who are competing against robust eCommerce business models and are not going digital and are still stuck only to the physical channel might be committing an even bigger strategic blunder.

Lack of support system

We can speak from our experience of the growth strategy consulting that people, processes, and technology determine how strong the supporting system of a business enterprise is. A good business strategy will wane in the absence of a relevant support system. The organization design must permit the implementation of a business strategy. For instance, if you want to improve the operational efficiency of your enterprise, it will require having a position of an operations manager in your organisation structure. The person who will take up this role must be carefully selected using a planned recruitment process. This position must be provided access to the resources that will enable its incumbent to carry out his duties effectively and efficiently.

How YRC can help: a glimpse

Having served the retail industry as retail business consultants for eight years now, YRC carries the experience and understanding of the functionalities of a retail business, including eCommerce as we seek to emerge as one of the best strategy consulting firms in the world and deliver the best services as a strategy consulting company. Our retail business consulting experts will identify the role of different business functions in making a business model work, and accordingly, the business strategies are formulated. Highlighted below are three important strategic areas to work upon for a retail and eCommerce business.

ECommerce without digital marketing is much more catastrophic for business than a physical retail enterprise without any advertising and promotional efforts because of the visibility factor. Your eCommerce brand may be selling the best products with the lowest prices, but if your potential customers never get to know that your business exists, unfortunately, it will be a wrap-up. Therefore, it is important to know who your target audience (potential customers) is. Which digital platforms are they on? How to maximise audience outreach? Our team of retail business consulting experts will follow proven, systematic and detailed strategies and methodologies to ensure that you have a robust digital marketing plan for your eCommerce brand, whether it is on search engines or social media.

In delivering our retail business consulting services, we will work closely with your team to identify the software requirements of your retail or eCommerce business towards ensuring that your enterprise has the right software platform. Our next endeavour shall be to ensure that your working systems stand integrated with the business software in place; integration of SOPs with the ERP. Having the right business software will enable you to have access to tons of business data for data analytics. This, combined with SOP-ERP integration, will further assist you in quick decision-making, crafting effective strategies, and giving effect to them.

Our growth strategy consulting approach will guide you towards building a robust people organisation and ensuring that your business remains supportive to strong business strategies when the need arises. Our service areas include organisation design, staff analysis and succession planning, performance and risk management system, change management, and policies and procedures.

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We are a boutique retail consulting firm. To know more about our eCommerce & retail business strategy consulting services or if you have any query for our team of retail business consultants, drop us a message and we will get back to you.

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