3 Tips to Automate and Grow Your Business in 2013
As a business owner, you have a million tasks to do. How do you find the time?
One way to make life easier is to find tools to automate your business as you grow. Business tools today are getting better and better. They’re also more affordable than ever.
Get ahead of the competition with these three tips:
1) Start Simple
You probably started out with a great product idea. That’s usually where it begins for product-based businesses. Once you have a product, you have to find a place to sell it.
If you’re reading this post, you have already discovered Storenvy, a web-based platform to sell your wonderful wares. Think about it, you can build your own store and also have access to buyers from all over the world via the Storenvy marketplace, and your own domain. That alone is amazing! What’s even more amazing is that it’s FREE!
This type of technology would have cost tens-of- thousands of dollars to build a few years ago, let alone the cost to market your products so buyers could find you. So nice work. You’ve already done some of the heavy lifting. And, if you don’t have a Storenvy account already, open a store today.
2) Automate as You Grow
Recently, Storenvy built what’s called an API (aka Application Programing Interface). Sounds nerdy right? It is…super-nerdy, actually.
Essentially what this means is that other applications can integrate with Storenvy to help automate the not-so-fun stuff about owning a business. This was not only super-nerdy, but super-smart of Storenvy because they wanted to make it easier to have additional tools to help run your business.
No matter what size business you have, when you sell products online, you have to ship them to your customers. At first, it’s pretty easy. You have a couple orders here and there and you are handling them on your own. Then, one day you start to get many orders and you begin having a hard time getting them out the door in an efficient way. Now you can start to see why the Storenvy API is so important. You need to automate your shipping process and Storenvy has a partner using their API that’s got you covered.
ShipStation tapped into the Storenvy API and is now fully integrated. It’s also extremely affordable. You should ask yourself, how much is my time worth? If I can save hours a day through automation, is it worth paying for?
Orders flow directly from Storenvy into ShipStation and you can print labels automatically without having to fill out any additional information. ShipStation integrates with all major shipping carriers and allows sellers to batch print shipping labels to get packages out the door fast. Not only can you print shipping labels with ShipStation, but you can also funnel all sales to Amazon FBA if you decide to have an outside company fulfill your orders for you. All of these systems talking to each other are made possible via an API connection. Awesome!
3) Sell Through More Channels
Customers are shopping in more places than ever before. Likely, you are going to sell your products in more than one channel to reach them.
You may sell at street fairs or trunk shows. You might also sell to stores via wholesale or consignment, or even on another marketplace, like Etsy or Amazon. You’re doing everything you can to get yourself out there, and why not? You have goals to reach, and you’re bustin’ your ass!
Enter the Storenvy API again to save the day! Not too long ago, soon after the Storenvy API was built, Stitch Labs jumped on board with Storenvy to help sellers that are, or will in the future, sell in multiple channels. What’s even better is that Stitch integrates with ShipStation, too. It’s like a smorgasbord of business helpers connected through these API thingys.
Stitch helps sellers automatically manage inventory in one or many different channels. It also provides awesome analytics to show you how your business is performing. Part of growing a business is making smart decisions about what’s selling, what isn’t and what should come next. Stitch helps you do just that with easy-to-understand interactive graphs and reports. Stitch also integrates with ShipStation via their API. It’s like a business package in a box!
Wrap Up
As you can see, technology is evolving and leveling the playing field for independent business owners everywhere. The internet is enabling commerce in ways it never has in the past. It’s easier and more affordable than ever to get your business off the ground. This also means there is more competition.
The question is, how are you going to take advantage of technology to reach your goals in a more effective way than the other entrepreneurs out there? Make it happen in 2013!
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This guest post was written by Jake Gasaway, Co-Founder & Director of Business Development at Stitch Labs
