Real challenges of e-commerce – Introduction

Internet is full of articles about e-commerce and different challenges that an e-commerce business may face. The problem is that a lot of these articles were written by people who never had an online shop! How do we know that? Let me start from the beginning although I promise that the story will not be too long. Once upon a time, NatWeb Solutions was like any other web development company. We used to build online shops to help our clients to start their e-commerce business. And everything was great, customers were happy and ready to start their new online journey. But they didn’t know about the dangers lying ahead. Neither did we, to be honest, so we searched, and searched, and searched…and we found no answers to the problems that our customers were facing. In order to truly understand our customers’ needs and be able to help them, we have launched our own e-commerce platforms sixkros.com and jubilya.com and now after almost 4 years of operations we can tell you what are the real challenges of e-commerce platform nowadays, at least in the middle east market (but not only!)

Never-ending journey

Have you ever wondered why we didn’t put “5” or “10” top e-commerce challenges in the title? Only people who gave up can put a finite number on the problems that your business is or may be facing. For most of you, it will be a never-ending story, because the world and your customers will keep changing every day, and as it happens you will face new problems and we will help you find new solutions! We will be gradually updating our series as we grow together and face new challenges. We will describe a different approach, solutions, and software that was used to solve smaller problems and move on to the bigger ones.

We have generated over 20 000 orders on our website so far and we want to share with you everything we have discovered about the customers, order fulfillment, returns, customer support, products, suppliers, software and many many other things that we hope you will find useful when embarking on the journey of starting your own e-commerce business.

We have also built Advanced Order Management System to help us tackle some of these problems and in these series, we will teach you how you can overcome these challenges by yourself.

Real challenges of e-commerce – Introduction

Part 1: Good Customers, Bad Customers

Part 2: Your package is ready to go

Part 3: Billing statements

Part 4: Marketing (coming soon)