When operating an e-commerce business or any business, you have to do whatever is best for your company, that can be like hiring someone, rebranding, or switching locations. This rule applies to any business. Whether it’s a restaurant, a marketing agency, or something else, then you always do the best for the business. Anyway, almost everyone has been on an e-commerce journey at home. It’s simple to start an e-commerce business from home as mentioned in a past article, “How to Start an E-Commerce Business from Home.” There is a point in time when your e-commerce business will become big, it has outgrown your home. It’s happened to many e-commerce entrepreneurs. What do they do then? They find a warehouse to store their inventory and to have a better system. It is no different for people who are new. To know when it’s time to leave, I am presenting you “3 Ways to Know Your E-commerce Business Has Outgrown Your Home”.
- Running Out of Space: The first way to know when you’re business has outgrown your home is by running out of space. If you’re working from your home, you probably have your inventory everywhere. In your attic, garage, basement, shed, etc. If you live alone, you could start putting your inventory in the living room and guest rooms. But it wouldn’t be professional or welcoming to guests when they come over to your home. Running out of space for new inventory will be bad for your company.
- Losing Items & Being Disorganized: When you start to run out of space, you start getting disorganized too, which isn’t good when you’re running an e-commerce business. For example, let’s say someone bought a specific book. You try to go find it, but you can’t. That’s because you’re disorganized. You want to ship the book to the customer before the deadline since they already bought it. You cannot find the specific book, and fail to ship it. The customer will want a refund and will never come to your website ever again because of the lousy service. This will happen more and more. Since your company gets bigger, you can purchase more inventory. But working from home with a lot of inventory can be a problem. You’ll start to lose everything and people won’t buy anything from you again, that’s how it can dramatically affect running a business from home.
- Items Will Start To Break: Since you’re running out of space, you have to cram most things in a single box. you think having less boxed in your main house will be good. That sounds good, but it isn’t. What matters is what is inside the box. Since there is less space, things will begin to break. Let’s say you have a vase. Someone online buys the vase and wants it at their home by tomorrow. You look everywhere for the vase and luckily find it at the bottom of a box, holding up a bunch of heavy paintings. You grab it and realize it’s damaged. You can’t find another vase of the same brand and color. You could give them another vase, but the customer will want a refund since it isn’t the one they purchased. It becomes even more chaotic and gives you more stress.
If you are one year into e-commerce, you should pay attention to these three signs since they could happen in the near or far future. When they start to happen, you’ll be under a lot of stress. Is there a solution to this problem? Of course, there is. The solution to this is to find a warehousing building. There, you’ll be able to keep your inventory organized and have more space. If you’re looking for a place to go to, then Kefi Spaces is perfect for you! And I’m not saying this just because, I am saying this really because it is a way to start from somewhere, with a flex space and in your own terms.
