Scaling Your Business with OpenCart: Handling Growth and Expansion

Buying online has become a part of daily life around the world even after the “new normal,” such that it will comprise 95% of purchases come 2040. Small business owners must then be ready to handle growth and expansion in anticipation of this global shift to selling through e-commerce stores as early as now. The best way would be to scale your business with OpenCart.

A Business Perspective To Handling Growth and Expansion

Scaling your business is inevitable for it is part and parcel of having a business. You need to prepare by having a clear-cut plan, ample funding, and the right technology to allow and support the growth your business needs.

Expanding the business’ operations is necessary to constantly meet your key performance indicators, which include increased market scope, well-addressed customer demands, consistent profitability, and higher revenues. Identifying the best and time-tested strategies is then a must to ensure your business expands its operations.

1. Launch an e-commerce website

Launching an e-commerce website for your business is the primary step to scaling your business as it opens you to an international audience. The success of any website—whether e-commerce or not—involves having the right design, effective navigation, SEO-compliant content, and an impeccable user experience backed by good technology and security.

2. Choose the right technology

Choosing the right technology for your e-commerce website is the second step in scaling your business. What’s good about having OpenStore as your e-commerce website’s shopping cart platform is it is really designed to scale your business.

OpenCart is built with multi-store support that makes business expansion easy, especially online. This multi-store support includes the management of high traffic volumes and large inventories, among other array of features.

In addition, OpenCart has partnered with various payment facilities like Afterpay and Peach Payments to help small business owners scale and run their stores beginning with flexible payment options. These payment facilities help small business owners increase their online sales, improve conversions, get new customers, and reduce returns by as much as 18%.

OpenCart is also equipped with accounting integration for an easier means to establish financial and inventory controls that provide comprehensive actual business performance reports at any time.

A look at getTrusted’s OpenCart review will give you a good idea that this platform has many benefits including the limitless capacity for business growth and scalability.

3. Avoid common e-commerce challenges

According to Vue.ai, businesses engaged in e-commerce often encounter 20 challenges that keep them from growing and expanding online.

Cyber Data and Security is the primary challenge e-commerce website owners face online, especially when their database becomes a victim of ransomeware wherein they would be unable to access their website’s content.

Proven Data Co-Founder and Chief Information Officer Victor Congionti in an interview with Business News Daily empasized the need of small businesses to have a solid cybersecurity framework through tighter access controls and data security software, as well as, consistently improve their defenses against risks and vulnerabilities.

Of course, the bigger your e-commerce website grows, the more budget and effort you have to set aside for its security and sustainability online. OpenCart, which remains to be low-cost being open-sourced meaning no license required, has an e-commerce website’s security seriously in mind. OpenCart is equipped with security features such as two-factor authentication, SSL encryption, and regular updates to provide protection to a small business online store and its customer data.

The other challenges e-commerce website owners face are converting shoppers into paying customers, attracting perfect customers, customer experience, and customer loyalty are all in the top five challenges.

Online identity verification, competitor analysis, price and shipping, product return and refund policies, and finding the right technology partners are among the top 10 common challenges.

In addition, there’s customer support, cross-border eCommerce, marketing budgets, going omnichannel, data privacy, logistics, store agility, customer expectations, placement of website elements, and sustainability are the other challenges.

Each challenge has a solution. Yet each challenge is best avoided when you have a concrete plan and clear strategies for your online business. Handling growth and expansion then requires small business owners to set up measures that will help them not only be prepared but avoid altogether the common challenges faced with e-commerce.

4. Ensure Excellent Product Quality and Timely Fulfillment

No amount of planning, excellent technology, and marketing will ever make up for poor product quality and fulfillment.

Growing your business operations depends on providing an excellent product that meets customer expectations based on what they have been promised from your e-commerce website’s content and visuals. This includes timely fulfillment of product deliveries that arrive in good condition and on the delivery date expected.

In the light of product quality, being up-to-date with manufacturing techniques, consistently undertaking marketing research, and product testing are aspects small business owners also need to consider in expanding their operations.

The end goal would always be product quality assurance, especially for manufacturers, since there is a tendency to overlook this or to use low-quality materials in the face of the continuous rise of inflation in the world today.

Retailers, on the other hand, must also look into the consistency of the quality of the products they sell online and offline by carefully checking receipts and dispatches.

Both types of business owners have to inculcate in their people a culture of quality and accuracy such that orders are sent accordingly to the most minute of details, which is also part of meeting customer expectations.

In terms of deliveries, getting a courier company that is renowned for excellent service and courteous personnel are little aspects that help in scaling your business in a big way. The little things matter the most, as they say.

Assurance of product quality, order correctness, timely deliveries, and pleasant delivery experience are seeds that fuel positive customer reviews, which speed up your operations. Customer reviews, after all, are powerful and free word-of-mouth marketing that builds brand loyalty. It is a powerful tool in scaling your business.

Speaking of customer reviews, OpenCart’s technology has an available plug-in that collects customer reviews online. This technology saves small business owners the effort and money it takes when it comes to sorting and filtering online reviews to be featured on their website as a means to drive more income.

Scaling Your Business With OpenCart In A Nutshell

Scaling your business may seem tedious since it needs proper planning and careful analysis of the different aspects of operation to address customer needs and satisfaction. These factors have become less burdensome thanks to OpenCart, which has anticipated a small business owner’s need in scaling their business.

FAQs

1. What is OpenCart for?

OpenCart is an open-source software used in e-commerce websites for the collation, consolidation, and tracking of orders with added powerful features such as financial and inventory management, among others. It is a powerful software that provides ready-made templates for online stores that are customizable and can be integrated into various payment facilities and plug-ins for easy site management. In gist, it is a free e-commerce platform often used by small business owners for its convenience and powerful features.

2. Is OpenCart convenient and absolutely free?

OpenCart is absolutely free whether it is for a Cloud Store, your own hosting, or through A2 Hosting. Adding extensions and using available themes for a particular industry, however, would already involve charges.