Online Retail Business Growth Strategies

How to Grow Your Online Retail Business in 2025

It's an understatement to say that selling online is competitive – the fact is, online competition is brutal. To make sales, you need product availability, good pricing, and customer trust. However, when you make a sale, the costs can be high. Marketplace fees, Pay Per Click advertising costs, VAT or Sales Tax, and payment processing fees can take 50% or more of your actual selling price.

It is still possible to make money selling online, but if you want to have a profit left at the end of the process and sell at a competitive price, you need to run your business as efficiently as possible.

Running a small business always means multitasking. Many online retail business founders start out as their own chief revenue officer, warehouse manager, and order processing clerk. In this scenario, allocating time correctly can be difficult as it often means deciding what will not get done. When basic tasks like shipping orders have to get done, more important things can get overlooked.

A great strategy for deciding what you need to do next is to allocate a value to your time. The real cost of a minimum wage employee in the UK in 2025 is around £16 per hour. Imagine that every hour you spend on a task costs you that much, and then decide if it's still worth doing manually or if it would be smarter to find a cheaper way to automate that task.

In an online retail business, efficiency usually means two things: firstly, getting your stock levels right – not too much, not too little, but just right, or as close as possible anyway. Secondly, it means using the fastest and most efficient order management processes to ship orders as quickly and easily as possible. Even if your business is quite small right now and you ship your own orders, it makes sense to do it as efficiently as you can. This saves you time and effort to put into other things and ensures you get your processes right before hiring staff or outsourcing to a third party as you grow.

For an online retailer, the key to efficient stock holding and order processing is always to get the right combination of software and processes in place. You can run a small online retail business effectively using Excel spreadsheets and undocumented processes, but there will be an upper limit to the number of orders you can process effectively each day using manual processes and Excel. This number decreases as you add extra sales channels like Amazon, eBay, or other marketplaces. Once you reach that limit, you need to act fast or see your growth stall.

There are many software products out there that you can take off the shelf to set up and run yourself, but for businesses that are intent on growing into long-term, sustainable, and profitable ventures, it makes more sense to work with a partner like eTail Support. Experts can look at your processes from an outside perspective, help you reconfigure them for maximum efficiency, and provide customized software to support your business growth for the long term. Customization is key because it delivers a system built around your specific business processes, not one that forces you to change your processes to accommodate off-the-shelf software.

The payback on a well-tailored software system can be very fast, almost instantaneous in some cases. The primary reason for that is that people are expensive. Minimum wage is set to rise to £12.40 per hour, and when you consider the costs of legally mandated paid holidays, pension contributions, and Employers NI, the real cost is more like £16 per actual hour of work. So, as soon as you start hiring staff, you really need to maximize efficiency.

eTail Support starts at just £50 per week to automate shipping label generation, pick note generation, and invoice generation, as well as automating stock control and daily purchasing tasks to get your stock levels right. Consider this: if you or one of your staff spend an hour each day generating shipping labels, that's a minimum cost of £80 per week to your business – a cost that you could eliminate for just £50 per week and get all the other benefits of better order processing and stock control as well.

Reach out to me at roger@etailsupport.com if you would like us to take a look at your business to see if we could help you – there is no charge for a consultation.