Weekend reading: February 19th

We made it to another weekend – one more week of winter is done! Have you noticed the nights drawing out this week? With spring flowers starting to pop up, it is time to get your selling strategy sorted for spring and summer if you haven’t already.

In this week’s post, we’re looking at the potential rival to Shopify that we think Amazon is about to announce, the online sales tax that could impact your business, a great free tool that we discovered this week, social commerce and eBay promoted listings – some good reads!

The latest from us

With the nationwide lockdown and many people on furlough, many people who have always aspired to be an entrepreneur but never had the time to make the jump have been using the time to finally create their own businesses. Since funds are understandably tight at the moment, we published our most recent blog about branding your business on a budget this week. This post isn’t just for new businesses though – if you’re scaling your retail business, you’re bound to find useful tips.

We’ve announced a couple of excellent new suppliers that have joined the platform this week, including one that stocks cotton and silk scarves that are of exceptional quality and are perfect accessories for cooler spring days. Check your emails, or sign into your Avasam homepage for more information and to see the new products you can source. If you’d like to get these updates directly to your WhatsApp, you can subscribe to our feed here.

The weekend reads

Did you hear about Amazon’s latest acquisition? This week they acquired Australian business Selz, which offers similar functionality to Shopify – which could mean we’re about to see Amazon develop a competitor to Shopify that sits within the Amazon ecosystem. Considering that it was announced this week that Shopify is now 40% as big as the Amazon marketplace since doubling in size in 2020, it is hardly surprising Amazon are on the case to defend their territory. We’ll wait to see what happens with this one – there could be exciting moves afoot. Read more here.

We’re sure you’re aware of the online sales tax – often referred to as the ‘Amazon tax’ – that is being considered by chancellor Rishi Sunak to start to make up the incredible amount of money that has been used to subsidise the cost of the pandemic to the UK. Unfortunately, the tax isn’t just going to have implications for bigger online businesses like Amazon and eBay – it will also impact smaller businesses that in many cases, may struggle to survive such a tax. Find out more here.

We discovered Clarity this week – and you can too! Microsoft Clarity is a great free tool to help businesses understand how customers interact with their website. The functionality includes being able to replay user sessions, to explore heatmaps for your website, gives you insights into problems and more. If you’ve used Hotjar before, you’ll know how useful this type of information can be – and this is just another option for your business, at our favourite price.

Have you been thinking about how you interact with your customers, especially on your social media channels? You’re not alone. Along with other industry leaders, we think that developments in social commerce, and the growth in sales functionality on social media will be massive over the coming 12 to 18 months. Find out more about social commerce and the benefits here.

When you’re selling using the DropShipping model, every penny counts – so you might be wondering whether using eBay promoted listings is worth the spend. You can find out a lot more about this on the ReplyCo blog – there are some valuable tips that we know many of our users will find useful.

Dates for your diary

Thinking about where retail and eCommerce is going this year, and wondering why people are still harping on about digital transformation? Register for The Retail Reset webinar, that is taking place on 25th February at 11am GMT. They’ll be discussing what businesses can do to transform online sales and to exceed customer expectations throughout 2021. If you can’t make this one, there are more scheduled through the year.

If you’ve grown your business but your payment solution isn’t suiting your needs anymore, or you’re about to scale up significantly, you might consider attending the Smarter Payments Summit virtual event on 8th and 9th of March. Find out more, including the suppliers that will be in attendance here.

We’ve mentioned this one before, but if you’re still unclear about the impact of Brexit and the changes coming on July 1st, then you’ll want to sign up for Tamebay’s webinar with VP Global Indirect Tax at Avalara on 30th March at 11am. You can sign up here.

If you’re an eBay seller, or thinking about starting to sell on eBay, you’ll want to attend eBay Open Online. The event isn’t until August, but you can sign up from May 3rd to secure your place. Find out more here.