This isn't a complaint, walking on a treadmill makes you stronger. Maybe every business is like this, but I've only ever run an ecommerce business so I wouldn't know. But I'm guessing that there are a ton of businesses that don't have to rethink everything all the time. Sure a pizza shop might want to do Facebook posts or take online orders, but as of right now it's a lot harder to start a pizza shop than to pop open a Shopify or Bigcommerce store. That difficulty means the pace of increasing competition for a pizza shop is less than most ecommerce stores face.
In 2017 we've done the following:
- went live with an automated tool to deliver drop ship orders to the appropriate vendors
- went live with a tool to make creating images that are best suited for social sharing much faster, and taught a virtual assistant in Philippines how to use it.
- made a change to the facebook open graph tag on our site to change the way our product pages get shared.
- updated the way our business software handles Purchase Orders
- launched giveaways using gleam.io for the first time ever
- launched exit intent pop ups using privy for the first time ever
- Implemented a tool from Shopify called Shopify Scripts to have more control over what shipping options we offer our customers
- Launched a new promotion where various products are free at a few different spend thresholds
- launched an entirely new site search experience
- used that site search to filter our collection pages
We're working on so much more for the future too. The train never stops and if we do stop investing we'll be toast. I believe our willingness to invest is why we still have a website that does sales whereas the majority of smaller online stores get the majority of their business on Amazon.