What Lessons Can Small eCommerce Companies Learn from How Kapruka Handled their COVID 19 crisis?

No, I promise you, this is not going to be another one of those rants about how badly Kapruka.com handled my order.

But I think there’s a lot to learn for new and upcoming eCommerce ventures from what Kapruka has gone through in recent days.

There are five things all eCommerce companies can learn from what’s happening in the industry right now, during this COVID 19 crisis. I am going to count it down by the order of importance. 

AT NUMBER 5; Always under-promise and over-deliver. When you build a brand in a growing category like eCommerce, basically you make a promise to your customers who have none to very little experience about your category.

 If you are not geared to live up to that promise, then don’t go and create an image for your eCommerce brand as the know-it-all expert in the market.

Number 4; eCommerce is not only about knowing how to set up a website and sell. Master the game of logistics, the game of marketing, and operations management. Engineers alone can’t run an eCommerce business. 

Number 3; Have professional management to run your company as you grow. You may be that visionary entrepreneur who built the whole thing from scratch, but as for any other start-up business at one point you are going to need qualified professionals to handle each of your operational functions.  

Number 2; Always be honest. People are smarter with their SMART phones. If you act dishonest, your customers will know that and they will start talking to each other negatively about you, and you can’t stop it happening.

At Number 1; Customer, Customer, Customer. No matter what happens to you, never lose focus of the customer. Your survival is dependent on how well you handle customer sentiments. Invest in a 24x7 customer care team. It’s not that costly to do these days, with the support of many digital solutions. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, the biggest mistake Kapruka did in this situation was to cut themselves off from customer communications. Not answering the phone, not replying to emails, chats or WhatsApps and not sending timely and detailed enough proactive communications from the brand. 

If they did, maintain that constant communication with customers, I’m sure a lot of customers including myself would have been much more empathetic about the hardships they would have been facing.