Understanding Scaling Ecommerce Businesses

Understanding Scaling Ecommerce Businesses

Ugo Aliogo in this report, examines the concept of scaling in Ecommerce

20-year-old Mitchell Zvagelskiy is a quick study. After observing the patterns of operations that undergirded the stunning success of Amazon, the global ecommerce behemoth, he proceeded to work at creating a platform that took advantage of the number of people thronging to use online shopping tools. That effort has become the multi-million dollar company, Scale Online, which he built with his business partner, Emiliano. “As my partner and I began to execute, we began seeing the results of successfully leveraging the eCommerce giant Amazon,” Mitchell said. “With the stores scaling, I began building a team to grow the business for me, allowing the stores to scale to six-figures in revenue per month, leading to $10,000+ profit per month across scaled stores.”

While running his business, Mitchell has learned a number of lessons which he documented with social media. “Through documenting my progress on social media, I realized the demand of others wanting to start and grow their own ecommerce business.” And he has advice for prospective founders: “Most people become too consumed with working in their business, rather than on it,” he explained. “This took me two years to understand. When starting my first Amazon based eCommerce store, it was just me and my business partner doing all the work. We did all the product research, order fulfillment, customer service; literally everything. As the sales began to plateau, we realized that this would not be scalable.”

Continuing, he added: “We then decided to begin outsourcing our work to virtual assistants overseas. Not only were they really hard workers, but they wanted to work, connect, and see the business grow.”

Mitchell espoused that offering beyond typical salaries or wages has also helped to keep staff motivated.

According to him, “We also gave them profit share because we learned that paying per hour is not motivating enough. Through profit share, our employees would get paid based on how well a certain store was doing, which naturally made them work harder, and gave them a feeling of value and purpose as they had a direct stake in the success of the company. We outsourced each part of the business which allowed us to step away and operate on the business, instead of working in it. When you view something from above (operate), you’re able to see every problem, allowing you to fix it.”

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