The Importance Of Excellence In Online Retail Execution

In my experience, a great idea poorly executed is worse than no idea at all because it consumes a lot of time, costs a lot of money, and usually fails. All too often, a new business launch fails because the execution was not properly planned and carried out.

Poor execution, in my opinion is the #1 reason why online stores fail. It’s not because someone doesn’t have the best designed website, the cheapest prices, or a good idea. Its the day to day actions and a cumulative list of things that cause them to go under. Every time I evaluated why I have failed in a business attempt, or why someone I know has failed, it has always come back to failure to execute at a highest level of excellence possible. Yep, it was my fault. To blame anyone or anything else is just redirecting the blame. The root cause always leads back to yourself.

For example, the most common excuse I hear for online store failures is, “I can’t make any money because my competitors offer better prices.” My answer to that is bull. There is more to online success than just pricing. In fact, I believe having the lowest prices actually hurts you, but that is a topic for another day. There is usually some other underlying cause for the failure which I will illustrate through an example.

One of the first things I ask in response to the pricing excuse is, “Can I see your site traffic logs?” or “Why are you spending x amount of money per month for “{insert some wasted expense here?}” These are just some examples of a whole line of things that usually aren’t being done. At the end of the day, whose fault is it? It’s not your competitor’s pricing. Its your failure to execute in an excellent way. Pick any excuse (not just pricing) and the result is usually the same. Its almost always redirected blame. And usually it’s not intentional.

High-performing organizations pay attention to details and focus on excellence in execution each and every day. They recognize the tremendous leverage in this area and the affect it has on their business.

Wal-Mart is a great example of how to illustrate this principle. (Both good and bad) They built their business on the idea “Always the low price,” but it is the capabilities of their organization and the superiority of their systems that ensure the right product is in the right place at the right price at the right time. No detail is left to chance. However, when someone at Walmart, or one of their business practices has a breakdown in excellence, the effect can be lasting and costly. They can get negative media coverage and lose customers. A company like Walmart is big enough to recover. But businesses like yours and mine, we can fail much faster.

So all this begs the question about what we can do as small business owners to achieve a high level of excellence. The answers are varied and broad. But one thing I see over and over again (and I am highly guilty of myself), is the “eyes are bigger than the stomach syndrome”. We frankly spread ourselves
too thin and too wide. We do a lot, but we try to do too much too fast. We just let things happen to us, rather than being proactive and happen to it first. You have to be able to filter out what is important and filter out the rest. You have to be able to prioritize. If the task of the moment is customer
service related, you have to remember that “at that moment” you are serving “THAT” customer. And you do it to the very best of your abilities. The same can be said of any task. You have to have the mentality that whatever you are doing at any given time, you have to look at how you can do it better and do it.

As small business owners, we wear many hats. We try to do things ourselves that best be delegated to others. We delegate tasks that we probably should be doing ourselves. We are optimistic that good things will just happen if you work hard, or my favorite “I’ll come back to that when I have time“. But business is not that way at all. Execution with excellence in what you are doing plus hard work makes all the difference. Learning as we go, especially when we fail or have setbacks makes it easier to obtain next time. Making incremental changes and adapting to these situations is what makes your business grow and thrive.