Imagine this, a team of two, paving their lives together, creating the legacy they will leave behind.
Him, a graduated engineer by training. He’s as left-brained as one could be; analytically driven, calculated, and objective in his decision-making based most often on an identifiable set of pros and cons.
Her, a right-brained master of creativity, able to harness the beauty in this world so many take for granted or never see.
How it Started?
As a result of being parents to two beautiful daughters they begin making clothes for them as they start growing. Drawing inspiration from the seasons, the mother creates prints of blossoming flowers and green trees that serve as the foundational patterns for her pieces. It’s modest at first, but as time goes on the hobby soon bears the markings of a startup. First their friends wanted to get in on the cute designs and soon friends of friends start to make inquiries, this is where our left-brained friend sees an opportunity to share his wife’s work with the world. So, they set up a Shopify Store, do a little marketing, and start building a brand.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Much to their surprise their product line was a hit, an overnight success if you will. As they grew, the division of responsibilities fell on each of them as complimented their own talents. She took creative, design, product development, and marketing. He took logistics, inventory management, shipping and fulfillment, customer service, and strategy.
Soon, it wasn’t long before the requests outweighed their effort. And without the right analytics to develop a growth strategy they soon were in over their heads. As they thought about growth, questions came to mind that neither knew how to answer.
What was selling?
Who was buying what?
What were true production cost?
And the list goes on…
Soon they decided to free up their time to find a way to answer these questions by outsourcing some of the production to a local company. The only problem was the company they outsourced to didn’t understand the brand the way they did and decided to cut corners on quality in order to increase profit margins.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the result was a nightmare!
Returns went through the roof, payment disputes with PayPal caused financial gridlock, social media had suddenly turned into their worst nightmare instead of one of their greatest assets, shipping had been poorly executed by the job shop and so in some cases orders were incorrect and/or missing entirely, and needless to say — it wasn’t easy to manage.
Shopify data needed to be downloaded and analyzed against PayPal to understand what orders had been made and paid for or had been refunded. ShipStation data was needed to actually understand where everything either went or didn’t make it to. Social media platforms morphed into customer service platforms. Needless to say — the problem outgrew their bandwidth and one of the major issues was the inability to effectively organize all of the data to form information that could solve the problem. Such is the story of millions of entrepreneurs who start an e-commerce business.
As it becomes easier to start an online business it simultaneously becomes harder to scale smartly. It’s not enough to keep making more product and hoping for the best, a savvy business owner must have a detailed view of the entirety of their brand such as:
Detailed analysis and segmentation of core customers.
Daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly breakdowns of sales.
Full scope of each social media channel they are marketing through and real time analysis of how their efforts of doing on each individual channel.
And much more if one wants to grow their company intelligently.
This is the core reason why we created Blocklight, to help e-commerce business owners improve their ecosystem and maximize their efforts the smart way.
With the Blocklight Analytics Platform (BAP), the first phase of our offering, we’ve designed a multi-platform tool which will allow e-commerce business owners to visualize and manipulate all their data in one place. With custom-designed metrics now every business can have a full scope view of their e-commerce store by creating segmentation that allow them to compare all aspects of their site such as: returns by item or category, shipments by region, or simple contact aggregations, and much more. The Blocklight Analytics Platform also allows you to view and compare the data of your social media marketing efforts in one place so you can see up front which channels are working best for you and how.
It’s never been easier to go from concept to market and start growing an online business immediately, but without the proper tools one is 100% likely to run into a wall that, more often than not, they’ll find themselves banging their head against instead of breaking through.
We aim to arm such businesses with the correct tools to break through that wall and achieve the substantial growth that every hard-working entrepreneur desires and deserves.
See your business differently. See it with us.
- Blocklight
Our Inspiration: https://bit.ly/2m5umCB
Our Solution: https://bit.ly/2NEBene