Chris Gronkowski runs Everything Decorated, an online shop for personalized gifts. “Choosing inventory to offer is the hard part,” he says. “We are a small family-owned business, so we have to make the right choices with inventory and colors or it really affects our cash flow and also our storage space. We have our own manufacturers for almost all of our products, and lead times are usually 3-4 months, so we have to be on top of our ordering or we will be stuck without product for months at a time.”

This dilemma is a familiar one in the e-commerce space. So what’s a store owner to do?

Read these tips from successful business owners on choosing inventory that sells.

Thanks to Nicole Terborg of Awesome Dynamic for contributing this guest post on finding an e-commerce consultant.

E-commerce consultants are experts in the world of online marketing, often specializing in specific tools or platforms. They have the skillset and knowledge to help you thrive in an ever-changing digital world.

Hiring a reliable, professional e-commerce consultant is one of the best things you can do for your online business. Anyone who has ever sold online, through Amazon, eBay, their own website or another e-commerce platform knows that the internet is a competitive, fast-paced environment; one that is tricky for most businesses to navigate on their own. 

That being said, there are some important considerations as you think about how to work with a trusted e-commerce consultant.

Thanks to Andrew Maffettone of Seller’s Choice for contributing this guest post on improving your product imagery.

When people shop online, your product is only as good as its pictures. Photos are one of the most powerful tools you have to create a compelling narrative which will convert your brand into sales. Product imagery is a key component of a complete brand strategy that can dominate e-commerce sites.

There is no such thing as a good product image. There are only images that contribute to compelling brand stories, and images that don’t. A non-blurry image with a white background may sell screwdrivers, but an out-of-focus shot in a forest might sell mountain bikes. The good image is the image that works. Consumers make decisions by locating products in values, goals, and strategies. Let’s go through four ideas to help you move toward compelling, story-driven images that sell products:

• Have a diverse portfolio of images to use for different situations.
• Use the right tools, either through in-house setups or outsourcing.
• Tell a story with bold images
• Work from images to brand, not brand to images

An Amazon A/B testing tool helps e-sellers figure out what exactly about their product listing drives customers to act. In a traditional Amazon split test, sellers run variants of their product listing, collecting data over time to figure out which listing garners more conversions and sales.

These four tools can help you carry out an Amazon A/B test. The first three gather data from live tests on the Amazon marketplace. The data comes from actual customers who browse your products—although they do not know their shopping behavior is being monitored for a test.

The fourth helps you choose which variants (such as title, images, and description) customers will like best before you go live with your product and outside of the Amazon marketplace, giving you more control.