What Can You Do To Be As Efficient As Amazon With Your Online Store? (It’s Easier Than You Think)

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Turning your business into an entity that’s as efficient as Amazon sounds impossible. After all, didn’t Amazon invest billions into robots and software features for its website? 

The latter part of that statement is true: Amazon spent a lot of money. But it turns out that progress is a funny thing. It turns out that modern stores don’t have to spend as much to get the same results because of the inevitable rise of technology. 

But what specifically do you need to do to be as efficient as Amazon? 

Let’s take a look. 

Always Improve

First, you’ll want to start at the cultural level before you start spending any money. You’ll want to get into the mindset that your team needs to improve constantly and do things better every year, even if the path ahead isn’t obvious. 

Amazon didn’t know the exact path it would take to become the most popular online store across the globe. But it did know that it would need to do something special if it was going to succeed long-term. It tried a lot of things (remember the Fire phone?) but ultimately settled on its current model of ensuring customers get the products they need quickly (something that has served it well). 

Amazon isn’t a conservative firm in the financial sense. It’s okay with testing new strategies and adapting to industry trends, and its people know that, too. They’re also willing to put in the work and get the job done if it means pushing the company forward. 

Invest In Smart Marketing

Another pro tip is to invest in smart marketing. Getting this aspect of the business right can improve efficiency enormously and make things happen faster. 

For example, you’ll want to ensure that you’re using retargeting ads for cart abandonment. These are useful because they show your leads the SKUs they had in their carts before they left your site on third-party websites. 

This tactic is becoming less popular these days because of privacy concerns. However, most customers are so used to it that it’s become a normal part of life for them. Whenever they see your ads with the items they want on another website, like a news site, it encourages them to return to you and complete the sale. 

You can also run product listings optimized for SEO. These are helpful when you want to reduce your online advertising costs, which can sometimes get out of control. Cutting down on these is useful because it means that you can generate traffic more organically and don’t need to rely on paid ads. 

Leverage Customer Reviews

Another pro approach is to leverage customer reviews in any capacity you can, something that Amazon uses to its advantage. 

This approach is powerful because it positions you as a market intermediary, not someone trying to sell people products the hard way. It gives you more power to decide which goods appear on your site while improving your relationship with your customers through transparency and honesty. Ultimately, you’re trying to help them. 

Leveraging customer reviews is easier than ever today because of platforms like Shopify. These often come with widgets and add-ons that will automatically include review-creation features for customers and add anything they write under relevant products, along with a star rating. 

To collect reviews, make sure you send follow-up emails to customers. Not everyone will respond to them, but a handful will. Then, you can use these reviews to bolster your services (if the reviews are about you) or add them to your site. 

If you’re having trouble getting people interested in leaving reviews, add incentives. For example, you could send them a coupon or enter them into a prize draw. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. 

Lastly, for this section, make sure you post products with positive reviews prominently. Make it clear that these are the products you recommend and the ones you think people should be buying. 

Improve Your Inventory Management

Another way to be as efficient as Amazon is to improve your inventory management. If you can get this right, it can cut your costs tremendously, which you can then pass onto consumers to improve your competitiveness. 

Of course, developing these systems yourself is challenging. But you can use existing Shopify fulfillment to do it for you. These services already have the robots and warehouses in place to manage the physical logistics of your online store, negating the need for you to do it yourself. 

If you can use real-time inventory software, that’s even better. These systems show you what you have in your warehouse at any given time and what you might need, given the demand. 

These also help you with things like forecasting seasonal demand. You can see how many products of a certain type need to get into your business before the peak hits. Fulfillment companies can do this for you, but you may want to monitor them for a while to ensure that you don’t run into stocking issues that could leave you out of pocket. 

Sometimes, a just-in-time approach can help, too. However, such setups aren’t for everyone, so you’ll want to see whether you can pull something like this off. Usually, just-in-time only applies if you have a lot of customers and integrated supplier networks that can react quickly to your changing requirements. 

Use Data To Make Decisions

Another feature of Amazon is the company’s drive to use data to make decisions. The firm believes in keeping its approach to business as objective and bias-free as possible. 

For example, it automatically tracks best-selling products and highlights them, something that you can do, too. When there’s a lot of choice, many customers just want something that works, and so they often look to the retailer for guidance to make a decision, something Amazon offers. 

You can also track customer behavior, as Amazon does. Monitoring what people are doing on the site is helpful a lot of the time. It shows you where they go, what interests them, and where they’re abandoning their carts. 

Sometimes, you’ll find that your sales funnel is working well, except for one small point. It could be something as simple as a misplaced call-to-action button or some text that doesn’t show properly on a mobile device. Whatever it is, once you fix it, you often see improvements fast. 

Automate As Many Small Things As You Can

You can also be as efficient as Amazon by automating all the small things you can. Ticking things off one by one over the years is one of the best ways to boost your business model and get more done without having to hire massive teams of people. 

For example, you could automate order processing. You don’t need someone at your end to collect the order and send it to the distribution center–software can do that. 

You can also use automation for inventory tracking. These days, there are plenty of apps that will do that for you and connect to GPS so that they can keep customers informed. You don’t need someone at your head office taking care of this. It’s a waste of time. 

You might even think about automating some aspects of customer support with chatbots, which Amazon also does. These systems use natural language processing to understand what customers are saying and respond appropriately to them. 

If they think that the customer needs help from a rep, they can escalate. Otherwise, they deal with the issue there and then, preventing clogging up your customer service team. 

Use Fast Shipping

Using fast shipping is another way to make your online store more efficient. The quicker products can be on their way to customers, the more competitive you’ll become. 

Make sure you use a reliable third-party logistics provider. These can be game-changers, especially if they’ve invested in their systems and offer advanced services like same-day delivery. 

If you can work with local pickup points, that works, too. These are convenient when you want to get items out to customers fast and avoid last-mile delivery issues. It’s not quite as convenient, but many customers go to stores to buy food or shop in malls where these pickup points may be helpful. 

Another option is to optimize packaging to make handling more efficient. Amazon does an excellent job of this with batch packing, but you may need additional systems. 

Using a simple piece of cardboard, as Amazon does, instead of boxes is also useful. There’s less manual work if you can automate this part of the service, helping goods get out to customers even faster. 

Optimize Your Website Speed

Lastly, it helps to optimize your website speed if you want to be as efficient as Amazon. The online retailer actually kept its original website for much longer than anyone anticipated, simply because it wanted it to work well, even if it looked outdated at times. 

As someone looking to set up a business in 2025, that’s less likely. But, ultimately, what matters is the speed of the service and how quickly people get the products they want.