The Essential

e-Commerce Tech Stack

Four important tools for running your business
—and one that you simply can’t grow without

By Webgility Founder and CEO Parag Mamnani

 Let’s Talk.
It’s time you heard the truth about your e-commerce
business. I know you’re passionate about your
products—you spend sleepless nights obsessing
about them. You’d rather sit by yourself in your
warehouse instead of socializing with other humans.
Turns out you’re not alone. In fact, soon after opening up shop, most online
sellers find themselves in a wasteland of lost perspective. Lured in by the false
charm and naive promise of the virtual mom-and-pop world, they become
trapped in a universe where the shelves will never be full, the data will never
make sense, and the margins will never be enough.

Fortunately I’m here to tell you, no matter what your mother said about hard
work and pulling up your bootstraps, blind doggedness is not going to keep the
virtual retail lights on. You want to pay the bills and
have some left over? You’ll need to assemble the ideal
e-commerce tech stack—made up of best-of-breed
systems and software in each relevant vertical—and
48% of
shoppers first
soon you’ll employ teams of people whose job is to
turn to a mass
obsess about your products, data, and margins. If you
commerce
want a retail business that’s sustainable, growable,
marketplace for
and profitable, start here.
their purchases.1

1. Sales Channels
Find out how and where you’re going to list, sell, and collect payments for your
products. This means a choosing a shopping cart and marketplace—I recommend
at least one of both and maybe even a few of each. Since your livelihood is at
stake, beware of less established platforms and go for the tried and true. To be

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 specific, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce are
among the most trusted and reputable shopping
carts. And the big marketplaces are easy—Amazon,
eBay, Etsy, and stay tuned to hear more from
Walmart and Jet.

And don’t forget a point of sale system for selling

in person; I like Square and Shopify POS. If you
choose selling systems that can handle huge traffic
and offer maximum exposure, you won’t have to switch over as your business
grows. Better yet, if you work with selling systems that assume your products are
for sale on multiple channels, they’ll be easier to keep in sync. More user-friendly
systems take less time to manage and afford you the freedom to experiment with
new channels and markets as the business grows.

2. Accounting
In e-commerce, you must have a system of
record and, for most, that is accounting. Because
once you have products, customers, and orders,
you’ll need to make sure you’re in compliance
with the government. Yes, you need to track how
much sales tax
There are more than you’ve charged

12,000 and will pay, how much money you made, how
much money you spent, and how much profit you’ve
sales tax jurisdictions claimed. Tracking all of this yourself is a huge waste
in the U.S.2 of your time and, frankly, paying an accountant just to
enter data for you is a huge waste of money.

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QuickBooks and Xero can handle accounting for even the most complex
e-commerce businesses, so that’s easy. And as your business grows, the minutia
of sales tax and payroll can be tricky, so be sure to look at add-on offerings.
But don’t forget, the simple data that you were gathering before was sufficient,
but to grow, you need to have all of your systems working together. Then you’ll
have some insights on what the heck is going on with your business.

3. Inventory management
Once you know what you’re going to sell, you’ll
need a way to organize, catalog, and track all of
your products. If you’re a small seller, you can
probably get away with just tracking everything
in Excel, but everyone knows that’s a fool’s game.
At the very least, your accounting system can
help you manage your inventory, but that’s a
topic for another day. For something more robust, use

22% of
a sophisticated inventory tool that will grow with the
complexity of your business, like SkuVault. If you’re
online buyers lucky enough to find yourself with large, or multiple,
receive different warehouses, I suggest a warehouse management
products from what system like Skubana. It will track what you have, locate

they ordered.3 it, tell you how big it is, and even tell you how best to
organize and store it.

4. Shipping
Since you’re selling online, you need a way to deliver the items. In its simplest
form, you need to log on to a website to print a label from UPS, FedEx, or USPS.
Better yet, use a more comprehensive shipping tool that will help you compare

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 carrier rates, standardize packing and fees,
generate labels, put it on the package, get it out
the door, and inform your customer that it’s
on the way.

Now I’ll let you in on a little secret: Profit margins

like to hide out in shipping and fulfillment
costs, so while using an all-inclusive system
like ShippingEasy or ShipStation might seems like an extravagance early on,
it will actually mean cost efficiency and workflow
streamlining that’s well worth it in the long run. Don’t
be shortsighted, realize that as your business grows
66% of
online buyers
and your shipping and logistics become more complex,
decide not to
a robust shipping tool will sustain much higher volume
buy because of
and handle far more use cases like dropshipping,
shipping costs.4
multiple locations, and high volume sales.

5. Integration
Hear this: No single-channel, multi-channel,
or omnichannel e-commerce business
will last and grow without some way to
connect it all together. It’s very simple:
You must integrate your systems. Without
integration, you have no visibility, no ability
to identify problems related to costs and
expenses, no insight into inefficiencies, and
no actionable ways to increase your margins
and profitability. And don’t be fooled by the

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minutes you spend in data entry every day, they all add up to hours and days
each month that could be better spent growing your business.

When building a business, even the best tech stack is not worth a damn if
each vertical exists in isolation. Integration is both the strong foundation and
the mortar that holds all of it together. One could even argue that integration
prevents you from losing your mind. Do yourself a favor and get yourself an
integration tool.

See that? You can handle the truth. Good talk.

Start a free trial of Unify.

575 Market Street, Suite 1900

San Francisco, CA 94105
(877) 753-5373 USA
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sales@[Link]
[Link]

About the Author

Parag Mamnani is Founder and CEO of Webgility, Inc. His
experience with thousands of e-commerce customers and
more than a decade of building software and systems for
online retailers makes him uniquely qualified to advise on
all topics related to e-commerce. Follow Parag on Twitter.

The Webgility logo is a trademark of Webgility, Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of
their respective owners. © Webgility Incorporated. All rights reserved.

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