If you work daily in Ecommerce, maybe you can relate. And wine or scotch could mean an inordinate amount of coffee, tea, chocolate or other snacks. But working in Ecommerce, as fun and exciting as it usually is, presents numerous challenges.
Whether it’s the potential of your site going down during heavy traffic periods (hello Black Friday), a promo code not working as it should, a glitch that merchandises the site with sold out products that appear available to be bought, or the constant stress of knowing a misspelled or poorly timed email can harm conversions, and you have some pretty stressful events.
This all adds up to an elevated amount of probable stress. And you know what? Any Ecommerce professional will likely tell you they wouldn’t have it any other way. You see, there is an athlete-type mindset that passionate Ecommerce experts possess. Every big sales spree, every new launch, every new test, and every new optimization requires planning, practice (hello dev. environments) and precision. Not so much different than the athletes we admire.
There is a great article on stress written by Alan Goldberg called Peak Performance Under Stress: 11 Guidelines for Winning Coaching. The 11 guidelines are listed below, but notice some of the parallels between sports and Ecommerce, which I describe in italics below each of the 11 guidelines:
1. Coach the Process, Not the Outcome
Ecommerce Parallel: Sometimes we jump right into initiatives without the proper process. For example, you may launch a new email tool with no process or strategy of how it will be used, and who will be using it. Better yet, how many brands have launched Ecommerce with no processes and then wondered why it failed? Understand what building blocks will get you to success, rather than focusing on success right away and building without a plan or processes.
2. Teach an Awareness of the Stress/Performance Curve
Ecommerce Parallel: Imagine you’re in the month of November getting set for Black Friday, or in December launching Boxing Day activities…yes, that feeling. We all know stress levels trend north in the last 6 weeks of the calendar year, but you also set yourself up for success by mindfully knowing you may need to do a bit more in those months (work longer hours, put extra effort, test more often, etc). You can even help prepare yourself for these longer days and potential stress periods by getting an extra hour of sleep by going to bed earlier than usual, exercising in the morning, or by eating a bit more healthy than you’re used to.
3. Teach Coping Skills, Don’t Waste Your Time Yelling at Your Athletes to “Relax”
Ecommerce Parallel: Sometimes it’s helpful to step away for lunch, coffee, or even an after-work drink and come back to your project with an open mind. One of the fashion sites I managed needed a way to boost conversions before a pivotal year-end. It was also during code-freeze, so no new programs or initiatives could be launched. The team and I were over-thinking things. Driving into work the next morning, I stopped at a Tim Horton’s drive-thru for coffee, and saw someone talking on a cell phone. That’s when it hit me. I thought: ‘why the heck don’t we call (yes, call!) our best customers and offer them an aggressive offer if they spend over $150 and purchase in the next 48 hours.’ So we did. Both conversions and average order value (AOV) increased, and made management very happy.
4. Teach Reframing in Practice
Ecommerce Parallel: We’ve all worked with sub-par Ecommerce platforms. In fact, each and every Ecommerce platform, from Magento to Shopify to Hybris, will lack something or other you think is vital. And it’s easy to play the blame game. But Ecommerce professionals can look at these disadvantages and find creative ways to turn them into positives. For instance, I once inherited an email tool that was anything but special. However, that tool made me find a number of ways to be creative without all the bells and whistles of your standard, intuitive email platform.
5. Use Humour
Ecommerce Parallel: Athletes usually play their best when their loose. And employees are usually at their peak when they are having fun on the job. Ecommerce is already full of stress, so it helps to often lighten the mood. I remember I once had an employee who said the absolute darnedest things, but every time she did, the mood got so much lighter, smiles crept on the faces of my team, and we felt like we could tackle anything. When teams enjoy working together, it also makes it easy to stay late (yes, Ecommerce is known as the “stay late department” or “shut the lights” department). But when you have fun, challenging times can become fun, challenging times. There’s a big difference.
6. Provide a Perspective
Ecommerce Parallel: Yes, it helps to have a big picture approach. However, that big picture (for example, a website launch) should be broken down into small steps so team members always feel like the project is advancing. Especially for a long, website launch project, the finish line can seem far away, but there is much to accomplish every week to get to that ultimate launch goal.
7. Use Simulation Daily
Ecommerce Parallel: I absolutely love this line in Dr. Goldberg’s article: “Practice does not make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.” For Ecommerce professionals, while we don’t hold practices per se, we can liken this guideline to testing on development or staging sites, or testing in general. Every test is a chance to improve a metric, be it Ecommerce conversions, website traffic, newsletter signups, etc. The more we test, the more success we draw up.
8. Create a Go-For-It Atmosphere
Ecommerce Parallel: Fail fast, right? While no one likes to make mistakes or fail, it’s really how you respond to mistakes that separates you from the rest. If you don’t learn from mistakes and are scared to make mistakes, I wouldn’t want you part of my team. If you make mistakes and adapt, gather learnings or experiences from each mistake, and improve, then I would love to have you on my team any day. (I once had an employee who kept making the same mistakes on monthly reports he would put together, always messing up the dates and not always checking that the sales numbers were accurately entered. This employee didn’t learn from his mistakes, and didn’t last too long on the team). If you want your team to hit digital homeruns, they have to swing – and miss – sometimes. Let them swing!
9. Separate Self-Worth From Performance
Ecommerce Parallel: As a Manager, you need to be sure you separate your employee’s performance and how you feel about them. And that’s no easy task, but it is being a good Manager. Some employees will never be the positive, happy-go-lucky team members you want them to be, but they are great at what they do; others are amazing individuals , friendly, and you could see yourself being friends with them outside of work, however, they are just not suited for that particular role. Just as coaches have to separate self-worth from performance, Managers have to do it with their employees. Case in point: usually, those who work in social media are young, friendly, ambitious, and don’t like waking up early. But I know a few of them who are the complete opposite of those attributes (i.e. they are in their 30s, and come off as stand-offish and not very personable) but they are amazingly creative social media experts.
10. Challenge Your Athletes, Don’t Threaten Them
Ecommerce Parallel: In what sometimes may appear to be a fine line for the Manager between a challenge and a threat, your employee sees it differently. A threat that the next time your employee is late they’ll be reprimanded or the next screw up will cause them to be terminated will not help the employee’s performance. Instead, why not challenge them to be better? Why not empower them? You have nothing to lose. I once had an employee who appeared disinterested at times. However, the more work he had, often, the better he performed. It was as if I had to give him an overload of work for him to thrive. And when I empowered him to make decisions, he was motivated. I got to understand that he was not the self-starter, self-motivated person he said he was; he needed that push from time to time.
11. Focus Your Players for Peak Performance Under Pressure
Ecommerce Parallel: Every Ecommerce team loves to look at their online competition. We sign up for their emails and welcome offers, order from the competition to test out the process and delivery experience (yes, it’s true…and yes, we often return the items), follow their social media channels to see what strategies they are using, and scope out their digital teams on LinkedIn. However, if you do this daily, you can get lost in the activity, and not focus on what’s important – namely, improving your own Ecommerce operations. Research has its values for sure, but I have never seen an email program improved trough days and days of research. At some point, you have to look at your own business objectives, and see what sticks. If research proved instantly actionable, we’d all be the next Amazon. Much like athletes can get psyched out by thinking too much about the opposing team, Ecommerce teams can lose track by focussing on the competition, or the numerous tasks that have to be completed. Any Ecommerce site is a journey, not a destination.
How to Reduce Daily Stress Levels in Ecommerce
While it’s often hard to completely eliminate events like mentioned above, there are two things that might help prevent or limit them.
Planning. While it’s often hard to completely say for certain there will be no website downtime, you should work with your IT team and/or hosting providers to ensure you have enough bandwidth to manage the peaks in traffic and orders you expect. I would even go so far as to share your promo cadence, email calendar, and expected peaks in traffic.
Testing. Before you deploy, test! I urge you to consider having at least a testing environment (often called development or pre-production sites) so you can test changes in coding before releasing them to the public. At the very least, if you don’t have a dev. or testing site, you should test on low traffic pages or during non-peak traffic periods.
If you plan and test, you can at least minimize the issues any ecommerce expert is bound to encounter. But take comfort that for those long, never-ending weeks, you can always settle in to a nice brunello red wine, or your favourite single malt scotch.
What’s gets you stressed out working in your field? And how do you deal with it?
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