Fifteen Volo Tips for Ecommerce Success

In this post we share fifteen Volo tips for ecommerce success that we’ve accumulated over the last 21 years, and which are still relevant today.

Every year, for our customers – and in fact anyone who wants to download a copy and print it for themselves – we put together a Volo Ecommerce Planner. It contains holidays, memorable and fun days as inspiration for campaigns, while also serving as something to hang from the office wall and record staff holidays.

At the bottom of the 2025 planner we listed fourteen tips for ecommerce success. We’ve added one more tip for a nice round number, and present below our fifteen Volo tips for ecommerce success. You don’t have to be with us to profit from them, but it helps :-).

1) You need to do strategy AND execution. Strategy is the ‘what’, while execution is the ‘how’. Don’t confuse strategy and planning. Strategy is setting out what you’re trying to do, which you can’t necessarily control, whereas planning is where your costs are going to be, which you can control.

2) Take a seasonal approach to your products. Group products by their season and let that guide your planning process. Depending on the categories you sell in, the southern hemisphere flip-flops the seasons and that may help you even out your revenue flow.

3) Optimise your data when you launch products. Take the time to focus on the products you think will do the best first, working down from there. This is time-consuming, but worth it. AI tools may help you fill in the gaps (more on AI later).

4) Don’t let your data stagnate. You need to revisit it, update it and improve it, regularly, or get someone to do it for you. We have a range of partners whose services you can invest in to optimise your data, using their expertise and experience, so you don’t have to do it.

5) Do small experiments. Doing small experiments allows you to test whether what you’re doing is working. If the experiment works, widen it and double down. If it doesn’t, your investment was minimal, try another experiment. No sense in going full bore until the Internet’s instant feedback loop gives you the insight.

6) Embrace AI. Use Chat GPT, or Claude, or similar, to create draft content, documents, data and even code, but check everything. The paid versions of these tools allow you to build powerful projects and do amazing things. AI is the future; don’t let its opportunities pass your business by.

7) Automate. Automate (through a system like Volo system, and there are plenty of systems out there with varying functionalities and costs)) those repeatable tasks to improve your operational efficiency. Software does repeatable manual things better and more accurately than humans, freeing up your humans to do the ad hoc, value-add stuff.

8) Integrate. Some systems like Volo offer broader and deeper integrations than others, becoming the backbone to your business. More extensive integration drives better productivity (because the more you automate, the more productive you are, as we mentioned in the previous point), which improves profitability.

9) Do the research. Time spent doing the research always pays off. If you don’t have the time, does someone else? Research is something you can offload to specialist service providers, for a price, but it could be a lower price than your time. And did we mention AI is great for research?

10) Develop your own brand. Developing your own brands gives you more control, more security and more margins. Businesses that simply resell other businesses’ brands will continue to be squeezed at both ends: by consumers (via marketplace pressures) who want the best value for money, and by suppliers who have power, options and can also bypass resellers altogether.

11) Develop your web stores. You own the customer, the buying experience and you get better margins and resilience. All you have to do is get the traffic to your web store (and we don’t underestimate the commitment this requires, but it’s worth it). Web store platforms like Shopify are affordable, flexible and powerful.

12) Use the Volo ten-lever check list (this is a free Volo thing). We identify five growth levers and five efficiency levers You don’t have to pull every lever, but you should consider the potential value of each one, if you were to pull it. The check list is a great framework for rounding out your strategy and making sure you’re not missing any opportunities.

13) Use a good reporting and analytics tool. This (reporting and analytics) is the ‘super lever’ which gives you the information on the ten levers so you can make good decisions. Some systems will even make the decisions for you, if you like. Look for a system that can give you a wealth of dashboard views, reports and automated emails so you don’t have to do further spreadsheet work.

14) Diversify. Nothing stands still for long in ecommerce. New marketplaces emerge all the time, threatening the status quo of the established guard and presenting you with new, less competitive and higher-margin audience markets to go after, if the fit is good. Being multichannel gives you resilience and protects long-term profitability.

15) Be well, have fun and prosper! (This one’s kind of self-explanatory.)

Want to feed back on these fifteen Volo tips for ecommerce success, or talk to us about your plans, requirements, hurdles? If so, get in touch and we’ll set up a call.