This month we replaced our usual article with a webinar that will help you better understand what outsourcing means for your business and discover the benefits of such a long-term decision. You can listen to it while going about your work, or you can read the transcript below during your downtime.
1. Why should I choose outsourcing solutions for my online store?
Razvan Marinescu -- Managing Director Simplify:
What you would notice as an e-commerce entrepreneur is that, after a while, if you are doing a good job and your business is growing, it becomes increasingly difficult to stay in control and focus on the behind-the-scenes operations -- what goes on behind the curtains. How do you manage to keep up with order volumes on time? What do you do on Mondays when weekend sales have piled up and you had to call the courier in the afternoon to hand over those extra orders? What do you do on Tuesdays when you have fewer? Do you call a neighbor for help, phone a friend? These are challenges that do not necessarily represent your optimal cost, nor your focus -- what you should actually be doing. As an entrepreneur, you should ultimately be focused on growing your business.
2. What do I need to know when deciding to outsource?
Carmen Vasilescu -- Logistics Director Simplify:
Typically, the first questions that come up in business are about costs and volumes, but those are not necessarily the most important ones. I think I would want to ensure the flexibility of the partner I am about to work with, their capacity to handle my peak periods, and the dynamic range of services they provide. There are many, many factors I would include in my list of questions before discussing costs and the important economic component. What is very important when entering this type of collaboration is to make sure they understand your business, that they understand your needs. Look for a partner who truly understands your product, because e-commerce is not the same across the board -- it varies significantly from one product to another. Look for a partner who truly understands the dynamics of your business, and then you have found the right one.
Razvan Marinescu -- Managing Director Simplify:
There are plenty of solutions on the market, and we also have them within the Simplify ecosystem, through our partners Innoship and easySales -- readily available solutions to make life easier and to offer added value to consumers. That means giving them more delivery options, capitalizing on all the opportunities in the courier space, listing on various e-commerce platforms. There are a wealth of opportunities that are, I repeat, within arm's reach. They are very easy to implement in order to automate your business. You should find the best solution currently available on the market so that your manual input is not needed at every moment of the day, and your focus as an e-commerce entrepreneur should be on your competitive advantage.
3. When is the right time to outsource?
Carmen Vasilescu -- Logistics Director Simplify:
There comes a point when you can handle everything on your own -- you can coordinate order intake, administration, preparation, delivery, and courier relations. But the moment you want to grow and you want to have time for creativity, strategic thinking, and time to promote your product through marketing, leave the routine tasks to others. That is the moment you reclaim your time, and that is why you should consider outsourcing.
4. Do I need a minimum number of orders?
Razvan Marinescu -- Managing Director Simplify:
There are no small, medium, or large clients. Many of us are just starting out -- it is a strongly entrepreneurial space, and we do not want to treat clients as small or large. All of them are important -- a client who currently has 10 orders a day may have 200 to 300 in two years, and it is very important what solutions you offer them at the beginning of their journey. Loyalty is built now, when the need is great, when it is about trust -- because you are investing trust in a partnership like this.
5. Who are Simplify's partners and what services can they offer me?
Daniel Nicolae -- Co-Founder & Managing Partner Innoship:
Innoship is a technology company that helps e-commerce companies efficiently manage their own courier contracts, resulting in cost benefits, improved delivery service quality, and a better experience for the end customer. Innoship sits between a retail company's infrastructure and couriers, connected on one side to all courier companies via API, and exposing a single connectivity layer to retail companies. This way, once connected to Innoship, you can send orders to any courier company in the local and international market. You no longer have API development and maintenance costs, and at the end of the day, you have the ease to explore -- you can communicate and do business with any type of courier and any courier service.
Ciprian Cazacu -- Co-Founder & CEO Easy Sales:
We provide the e-commerce infrastructure through our connector with each individual client, and at that point they are free to choose where they sell, how they sell, and to synchronize their stock in real time. They avoid situations where, for example, they sell products they do not have in stock because they sold the same product across multiple channels. We essentially replace all the development work they would need to do for each marketplace and each channel individually. We also have a reporting area where they can see in real time what is happening, pull up a history, see how sales have fluctuated, which regions generated the most sales, which products sold the most, and which products had a high return rate. They have all kinds of reports that help them make decisions following the integrations they have set up.
Daniel Nicolae -- Co-Founder & Managing Partner Innoship:
We look at how to improve the post-sale process. How can I bring optimizations to the way I communicate with the end customer, how do I keep the customer updated throughout the sales process? I communicate with them via email or SMS at the right moments so they remain informed and have confidence that I am keeping them up to date on everything important that is happening. I do this and as a result manage to reduce the return rate. Implementing Innoship brings you very quickly, from day one, cost reductions, improved delivery service quality, and a lower return rate.
6. What advantages will I have for delivery services?
Daniel Nicolae -- Co-Founder & Managing Partner Innoship:
You are just two clicks away from choosing another courier to work with. You simply need to enter your credentials and that is it! And if, let's say, at some point you want to work with a company that does not yet exist in our courier library, we will implement it within a limited timeframe, as stipulated in the contract, at no cost to you.
7. I would like to outsource, but I am afraid. What should I do?
Carmen Vasilescu -- Logistics Director Simplify:
We had a client onboarding in our Simplify portfolio where the client went through the excitement of outsourcing for the first time. It was an incredible experience -- they would call me every evening and say, "I can't sleep, I don't know if I made the right decision, I don't know if choosing to outsource was the right call. Tell me, did I make the right choice?" When they asked those questions, it put pressure on my shoulders, I must admit. We did everything possible to process, in a single day when the products arrived, a very large volume of orders, and then I received a message that I believe will stay with me for life. They said, "Now I can sleep peacefully, and starting tomorrow, I am putting my marketing strategy into action."
8. Why should I choose an e-fulfillment partner like Simplify?
Razvan Marinescu -- Managing Director Simplify:
The online store receives or purchases goods from somewhere -- from a supplier that could be in Bangladesh, Poland, near Falticeni, or anywhere. We take over communication with that supplier, we handle bringing the goods in via air, road, courier, or any available solution on the market at the time. We bring the merchandise into the Simplify warehouse, we are integrated with all the API solutions used by online stores and the platforms they operate on. We receive orders from customers, we prepare orders for those customers. We have an interface connected to the full range of national and international couriers, and in this way, we ship the goods to our client's end consumers. So we cover the entire spectrum of needs. And not only do we cover it -- we optimize it, because that is the key message. We have control over the entire logistics chain, we have invested heavily in technology, and we have access to a very detailed and comprehensive database. That is why we can come up with solutions and ideas to optimize the logistics operations of online stores.
9. What else should I know about my online store's website?
Adriana Ceausescu -- Partner & Information Security Officer AA Data Box:
It all starts with an audit of the website you own. The audit covers the secure connection -- whether you have that https security certificate instead of http. Secondly, the website's vulnerabilities are audited. As I mentioned, applying measures to secure access to databases is essential. One example is 2FA -- two-factor authentication, which is increasingly used, including for VPN access to companies' IT systems.
Ionut Dumitru -- CEO ClusterCS:
ClusterCS is a server management and web hosting system. It needs to sit on a server somewhere in a data center, and certain software on it will deliver content from the database to form the website image we see. This server needs to be configured -- various pieces of software are installed -- and this is where ClusterCS comes in with the automation of these installations, configurations, and everything needed to deliver website content to the public. A cluster can provide this redundancy function. For example, if a server goes down, this event should not be felt by the end user. The system will continue to function, the remaining servers take over the workload, all page requests are redirected to the remaining working servers, and the system continues to function without issues. In cases of Black Friday-type traffic, you can set a safety margin -- if one or two servers go down, I can set a safety margin so that the surviving system can handle the traffic.
10. How can you improve communication with your customers?
Elena Bululete -- Managing Partner Conan PR:
You can use the tools that platforms make available to you, and you can also use the insights you get from your own website. For example, one piece of information I found very interesting is that most online purchases were made on weekends -- Friday, Saturday, and Sunday -- with the most intense activity on Saturday evenings between 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM. So, run your online ads when your audience is online and take advantage of all this information. A lot of people shop on the go, so take a look at your online store and see how complicated the purchasing process is. Think about how user-friendly the mobile version is, think about how many steps it takes for someone who sees your product on Facebook or Instagram to actually add it to their shopping cart. If the answers to these questions are more along the lines of "no, I'm not meeting these requirements properly," then rethink your business plan a bit, because a well-thought-out business includes these costs too.