If you’re the owner of an online business, you may have seen a sharp decrease in sales because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of you are struggling with the question of adapting your online business to COVID-19.
We asked owners of online businesses all around the world what they are doing to adapt their business in a world suffering from the Coronavirus. This is what they had to say:
Self Defense and Survival
My name is Bill Joseph and I am the owner of Frontier Blades. As an e-commerce business marketing self defense and survival products, we are experiencing positive repercussions attributable to COVID-19. As concerns for personal safety are becoming more salient due to potential threats pertaining to business shutdowns & supply shortages, individuals are seeking self-defense and survival equipment as a preemptive measure. As a result, our sales and traffic report from the past 30 days indicates a 53% increase in conversion rates, and a 44% increase in traffic.
However, we have also experienced negative repercussions attributable to the Coronavirus, including shipment delays due to global and domestic supply chain disruptions. Therefore, we are unable to dispatch customers’ orders in a timely manner. To mitigate these effects, we have analyzed our annual sales report to determine our best selling products, and have stored increasing quantities of these prominent products within our storage units. Additionally, as our quantities for a particular product decrease, we increase the price of the product to circumvent rapid depletion of our inventory.
Furthermore, we are employing multichannel selling as an effective strategy for maintaining and increasing profits by presenting our business the opportunity to reach a wider audience, leveraging both organic search and marketplace traffic for generating revenue. Additionally, selling on multiple online selling platforms is a practical marketing approach for increasing brand awareness, as this method enables us to reach new customers, which we can redirect to your business.
Lastly, we are prioritizing communication and transparency with our customers. With an E-commerce business, communication with your clients is an essential facet of providing satisfactory service. However, this aspect is further accentuated during national emergency conditions, as customers need to be aware of whether their shipments will be delayed due to supply chain disruptions.
Bill Joseph, Frontier Blades
Chess and Backgammon Sets
We are an online leading retailer of chess and backgammon sets. We have found a surge in demand for these traditional board games where a large portion of the population are staying home, they are certainly finding the time to take on a new hobby. We have indeed adapted our marketing to solely online considering there will be a larger interaction of customers with the internet. We have targeted this in the form of social media and of course Google ads. We find that Google ads tend to be more effective due to their ability to target specific keywords. We have also adapted on platforms such as eBay and Amazon where advertising is based on their respective campaigns.
Rizwan Girach, Chessgammon
Dog Training
We’ve adapted quite a bit with a major business pivot due to COVID19 by refocusing most of our marketing efforts towards our online course. Previously, our new online course was a side note, but now we’re promoting it much more heavily and putting it front and center.
We’ve begun focusing on our 30 Things to Teach Your Dog online dog training course as a way to better connect pet parents with their canine companions. We’ve seen a considerable uptick in course membership, as more people are stuck at home with their dogs and have smartly decided to take advantage of this extra time to work on training goals!
Meg Marrs, K9 of Mine
Workers Compensation
As far as marketing goes, we have paused or normal campaigns and focused on how we can be of help during the crisis. We are notifying are followers how we are dealing with the pandemic, how we are helping our employees, about the hours we are operating, and how we can help them manage the crisis.
From an operations standpoint, we have pivoted to focusing more on servicing our existing customers and less focus on acquiring new customers. If a the downturn in business is extended, customer retention is going to be more important than ever. We are focusing our energy on doing everything we can to help our existing customers with the problems they have now, so we can continue to serve them in the future. When the economy suffers, businesses shop around for everything. We are trying to position ourselves to lose as few clients as possible, while positioning our business well for new customers who are looking around for a number of reasons.
Walt Capell, Workers Compensation Shop
Pet Community
I work for a petcentric company called Pawtocol. When the crisis hit, we talked about how we could help, and we came up with the idea of PAWResponse – Pandemic Animal Welfare Response. We realized that first responders, medical professionals, and members of the National Guard may be away from home for extended periods. There are people sick and in the hospital who might need someone to care for their pets while they fight the virus. We remembered how, after 9/11, authorities were asking people to report bad smells in apartment buildings in case a pet had passed away due to an owner not coming home and we wanted to do everything we could to help them.
We also realized there are people at home who are lovely and may want to foster a pet, or volunteer time to make calls and send emails and there are rescues, shelters, boarding facilities, and veterinarians who might both be able to help and have assistance to offer. We decided to suspend our normal work and have set up a website (pawresponse.com and pawresponse.org) for people and organizations to either ask for help or to offer it, and we are working to match them up and make a difference however we can. People have been very supportive and responsive, and we’d love help getting the word out.
Monika Lain-Shaw, Pawtocol
Background Searches
At Nuwber.com we joined the anti-coronavirus effort and took these big steps:
- Integrated COVID-19 community stats right into our tool, essentially turning our people search engine into a personalized COVID-19 tracker
- Created a page with live COVID-19 status update: https://nuwber.com/coronavirus
- Added COVID-19 related message and a banner on the homepage
What we did and why: We merged our database of US residents with the real time statistics from official sources. Now anyone can go, find themselves on Nuwber and track how the pandemic spreads in their community. Also people can find contacts of their neighbors on their page in case they want to offer or ask for help.
We get over 3 million visitors monthly and we’ve already seen thousands of people using the new tracker feature since its launch.
Irina Slobodchikova, Nuwber
Freelance Marketplace
Lemon.io is an online marketplace to hire top vetted freelance developers on-demand. Usually, our main clients are early-stage startups, but, unfortunately, they got affected by the COVID-19 pandemic the most. In turn, it hit our business as well. We decided not to wait till the world falls apart, but to fight.
The problem we’ve faced is twofold:
- Startups are desperate to cut the costs;
- Developers are desperate not to lose the projects.
What can we do to help both sides?
- We’ve made a decision to waive our fees to 0, meaning we don’t get the commission at all.
- We’ve turned to our developer community, convincing them to bring down their hourly rates by at least 33%.
- Thus we’ve managed to reduce our price from $35-$65/hour to $25-$30/hour without losing the quality of our services.
Of course, this is a permanent situation – the offer is valid only for 60 days and only for those teams, who suffered from the COVID-19 the most or help to fight the pandemic.
*Why do we do this? *We simply do what we believe in – by cutting our cut today, we save our startup tomorrow (or make it even better). Startups are facing the roughest times now. We need to stay all together to survive the pandemic and its consequences.
Alexandr Volodarsky, Lemon.io
Employment Comparison Site
To be honest, our cold email marketing, long a pillar of company growth, has become much less effective in recent weeks. In the midst of the most feared pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918, this is not a surprising development. Managers and owners who used to be at least willing to listen to our pitch about virtual admin and HR services now seem to have something else on their minds. As do we all.
Faced with this reality, we have stopped cold outreach completely for the time being. Something about it just seems icky right now. Instead, we have gone forward with expanding our Google ads strategy, which is something that was in the works already. With money in the bank from a profitable 2019, this seemed to be a good time to roll it out. As to the long-term success, that remains to be seen.
Nelson Sherwin, PEO Compare
If you’ve got an online business, we’d love to hear about what you’re doing to adapt to Coronavirus. Leave a comment below!