The competition in the e-commerce landscape is constantly growing. The time of solely competing with Amazon is over; you also have to fight with other rising eCommerce stores that are targeting a specific audience with print-on-demand custom products. You need to put in more effort, more marketing costs that eventually increase expenses and reduce profits. And sometimes even draining of the budgets could happen that lead to cease of growth.

But, there is a smart way to ensure you keep moving forward — reduce your fashion eCommerce store costs. And you would be surprised to know most big e-commerce giants even hire managers to ensure they implement every possible measure to cut costs of their eCommerce stores.

In this post, we are looking at five sensible ways that will help reduce the cost of your eCommerce store.

1. Set Up The Right Business Model

This is very important. Set up the right business model. There are many business models out there. Most common stores operate on the basic business model of buying directly from manufacturers or suppliers and selling on their online platforms. If your eCommerce store is based on this business model, you need to learn the art of negotiating with suppliers so that you can maximize profits.

Print on demand is another great business model that many newcomers in the e-commerce landscape are relying on. It eliminates the need to buy inventory from typical suppliers. You just have to list the products on the website of a third-party print-on-demand partner, customer visits your website, place order, and order is sent directly to your fulfillment partner that stock the inventory and fulfill shipping under your own brand name.

So, carefully choose the business model aimed to minimize your procurement costs.

2. Reduce Your Product Returns

Once you have covered the technical aspect of your online business by choosing the right business model, the next step is to make sure your business adapts strategies that eliminate controllable expenses. One such expense is the expenses related to product returns. Reduce product returns. When a product is returned, it hits your business in many ways: first, you lose a sale; second, you have to bear the shipping cost; third, you need a resource to manage the returned product; fourth, products may no longer be applicable to resale as new.

Thus, the return is an expensive affair to handle. You can reduce your product returns by ensuring you provide a detailed description of the products on the website and add photos and videos related to the product so that users know what they are buying.

3. Avoid High-Risk Customers

Avoid high-risk customers. It may sound a little unrealistic, but you can segregate the high-risk customers if you perform the right analysis. Check out the source of your website traffic. Find out which sources have a higher conversion rate and research traffic from which source results in maximum returns and understand the reason for returns. If some customers are returning products just for some absurd reasons, it is best not to entertain those customers with promotional campaigns. Such customers do more harm than good.

4. Ensure Low Credit Card Processing Fees

Some of the fees related to the transaction are non-negotiable, like charges handed down from Visa, MasterCard, and others, but you can tinker a bit with the processor of your website payments. You can negotiate with your payment processing partner to ensure that you are paying a low processing fee. Minute differences in the percentages over the year can pile up and make a significant difference.

5. Use Marketing Funds Sensibly

We do not discourage anyone when investing in marketing, but we do recommend to invest sensibly, and that can happen only when you have basic knowledge about different marketing strategies and how they work for different audiences. Even the stores that register on our Print Genie print on demand drop shipping platform, we suggest all to calculate the ROI for each of their marketing campaigns because this is the only thing that matters. There is no point in investing in a campaign that has no return for you. It may be good for someone else, but if it is not working for you, there is no point in investing in it. Choose your market fund sensibly.

So these are five sensible ways to cut the costs of your eCommerce stores.

We at Print Genie make it possible for eCommerce stores to operate cost-effectively. All you have to do is just register your Shopify store on our print-on-demand dropshipping platform. We will hold the inventory for you, we will do printing, and we will also take care of your shipping, all under your brand name.