Today, setting up an eCommerce business is one of the best ways to generate a good income. However, it’s not easy – when your store gets large enough, you’d need to hire employees. One way to address your growing needs is to outsource services to third-party companies.
Usually, “outsourcing” refers to tasks like writing product descriptions, website development, marketing, technical support, and more. These activities are essential to your business, but they could take you away from your leadership responsibilities.
Outsourcing versus offshoring
People often confuse offshoring with outsourcing, though they refer to different functions. Offshoring typically refers to the act of moving entire business operations abroad. Usually, it means manufacturing or assembling products in countries with cheaper labor costs. Meanwhile, outsourcing involves moving services to other countries. Companies could use either or both of these approaches to running their business.
Outsourcing is an excellent way of regaining your executive focus, keeping costs down, and staying competitive. Small eCommerce businesses benefit significantly from outsourcing specific tasks. Here are some benefits of outsourcing and how it helps eCommerce business owners raise their revenue, streamline their workflow, and stay on top of their finances.
Outsourcing Helps You Save Money
Cutting costs is one of the biggest motivators for allocating tasks to contractors. If you hire employees full-time, you need to provide them with a full salary, benefits, and taxes. You also have to shoulder their professional development, set up their physical workplace, or buy equipment and new software they need to do their job.
When you outsource, you can set the terms for completing the project. Since you’re hiring contractors, you’re not obliged to provide benefits, pay taxes on their wages, or shoulder expenses they incur when completing your project. When you choose not to outsource, you have to handle the task yourself, pass it to an employee, or hire a new one.
You might also have to cut costs, even more, when you keep the tasks in-house in ways that decrease employee morale, like cutting hours, spending less on resources, and the like. Eventually, these measures will affect the bottom line since disgruntled employees won’t perform at their best.
Outsourcing Gives You Access to More Talent
If you limit yourself to in-house employees, you’ll only have a small pool of candidates for your projects. This situation becomes challenging if you need a specific skill that no one in your team has. If you outsource, you’ll gain access to talent from all around the world. You can grow your team’s potential by hiring candidates for specific skills like SEO marketing, technical development, advertising, and more. Outsourcing can even be a way for you to prequalify candidates to become full-time employees.
Outsourcing Gives You More Flexibility
Business owners often outsource essential tasks they need doing year-round. These tasks don’t crop up frequently enough to warrant hiring full-time employees. These extra tasks could pile up, though, meaning you’d need more hands during certain times of the year. For example, you’d need extra help as a project winds down or during sales, holidays, and seasons where you get high sales volumes.
If you want to add 300 new items to your eCommerce store, for instance, you’d need someone to optimize the product descriptions for each listing. If you don’t typically add that many items at a time, it will be taxing for your full-time employees. Relying on outsourced staffing for these descriptions means no more piling work on top of your regular employees’ current projects, boosting their productivity and morale.
Outsourcing Lets You Stay Competitive
If you only accomplish your bare minimum every quarter and don’t expand on your quotas, you’ll fall behind. It is the nature of competition online, and to stay relevant, you need to keep up. When you outsource, you become more efficient at completing tasks. You’re able to take on projects without spending so much, helping you stay apace with others in your industry.
Outsourcing Lets You Earn More
Besides helping you save, outsourcing also allows you to make more money. You already keep overhead costs down if you own a dropshipping store because you don’t need a physical warehouse to store your inventory. Still, you have to pay for other things – you need to spend on your domain, hosting, website, marketing, and other similar costs.
No matter how successful you get, you’d need to spend to earn. You have to expand your offerings, increase the number of products you sell, launch new campaigns, and more. If you outsource, you can help your company take more projects, which means more business. Best of all, you don’t need to spend on recruiting new workers. Your project’s revenue will go back to the company, letting you earn more and getting you a higher return on investment.
Outsourcing Enables You to Start Early
When you have to recruit to fill a role, you need to prepare for a long process. Besides posting the ad and interviewing the applicants, you still need to onboard and train those who pass. You won’t be able to start your new project or redo your marketing strategy right away.
Meanwhile, you take away several steps and are connected to qualified professionals or agencies if you outsource. Hiring someone else to do particular tasks means you don’t leave projects hanging and meet your deadlines.
Outsourcing Lets Your In-House Team Grow
Many arguments against outsourcing revolve around claims that locals and in-house employees stagnate or get left behind when you hand off work to third-party providers in other countries. However, this could not be further from the truth.
In a truly collaborative environment, your in-house employees will become better at their tasks if they work with outsourced personnel. You don’t need to spend on their training – working with experts from other countries will hone their skills.
Outsourcing Means Less Bureaucracy
Depending on where you are, hiring can be highly regulated. This situation can be tricky for small eCommerce stores selling items that have seasonal surges in demand. You cannot quickly hire staffers to fill temporary needs, and you have to follow long processes if you want to downsize your staff. If you outsource some of your functions, you can increase and decrease the number of staffers without having to deal with red-tape, letting you manage the ups and downs of your business efficiently.
Conclusion
Outsourcing specific tasks in your eCommerce business make operations more flexible. When you hire workers for seasonal activities, you can save on wages, employment benefits, avoid red tape, and gain access to talent you wouldn’t otherwise have. It’s the perfect solution for an eCommerce store owner looking for cost-efficient ways to run their business.
At CrewBloom, we help you hire premium talent at affordable rates. We provide remote customer services to eCommerce business owners, connecting them with top-tier professionals for sales, business development, customer support, client success, and much more. Contact us today for more information!
