The global ecommerce landscape projects global sales to surpass $7 trillion by 2025 and account for 24% of global retail sales by 2027. As consumer preferences shift towards online shopping, ecommerce merchants are presented with enormous opportunities for growth in operations, such as high volumes of sale transactions, omnichannel selling, and even cross-border or global transactions.

Along with great growth opportunities, ecommerce growth can also bring plenty of challenges to ecommerce merchants that hinder scaling. Fortunately, there are solutions and processes that can help address these challenges. Streamlining operations, automating processes, and partnering with industry leaders like Shopify are some key steps merchants can take.

This article will explore these challenges as well as present actionable solutions to enhance growth instead of hinder it.

Ecommerce Growth Opportunities

Using Shopify as an ecommerce platform enables merchants to scale operations seamlessly and efficiently. Shopify is a very robust and popular ecommerce platform highly-reviewed by real-world users and experts alike. On top of all the features needed for ecommerce operations, some ecommerce growth opportunities you can easily handle with Shopify are the following:

High volume of sales transactions

With 270.11 million online shoppers in the US, ecommerce has made the world smaller for buyers, and bigger for sellers. Ecommerce merchants can process sales orders across locations (states and other countries) and in different channels, too. Online sales have huge profit potential for businesses of all sizes.

Shopify expertly handles high transaction volumes via its scalable cloud-based infrastructure that can easily adapt to traffic spikes without compromising speed. Its latest report from the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) stated, “Shopify handled 57.3 PB of data from our infrastructure, 1.19 trillion edge requests, 10.5 trillion database queries, and 1.17 trillion database writes over the weekend—peaking at 284 million requests per minute on edge, and more than 80 million on app servers pushing 12TB per minute on Black Friday.”

Sell anywhere (omnichannel sales)

ECcommerce has allowed merchants to sell anywhere. With online shopping as the preferred buying method of nearly 60% of consumers, the Internet has also given merchants more channels to sell their products—marketplaces, mobile apps, and lately, even social media. In-person selling hasn’t gone away, too, making it a relevant sales channel even for primarily ecommerce businesses.

Presently, consumers expect a seamless and consistent buying experience regardless of the sales platform they use. This is why omnichannel selling has become the new standard of selling. Tracking inventory and syncing across multiple channels is a must, and delivering personalized experiences are expected.

Shopify provides built-in integrations with multiple sales channels that merchants can sync with and manage inventory, process orders, and fulfill purchases all from their Shopify dashboards.

Ecommerce Growth Challenges

Scaling ecommerce operations also presents a plethora of challenges, namely the need for an efficient and wholly integrated business system, automation of workflows, and compliance with federal and state laws, especially when it comes to sales tax.

Siloed business systems

Usually when businesses scale, there are certain features that are better off serviced by another provider. Ecommerce platforms provide integration capabilities for this need. The challenge is ensuring that all providers are compatible working with one another. Sales tax calculation software, for example, ideally should seamlessly integrate with a merchant’s accounting software and ecommerce platform.

Siloed business systems are prone to errors, operational inefficiencies, and declining sales.

Processes and workflows prone to human error

Ecommerce businesses that have high sales volumes also have high orders to fulfill and ship, and so are the rest of operations—customer service, marketing, and website operations. Workflows can become more complex, requiring more steps to ensure accuracy, and if not automated, can lead to more errors due to human error.

Compliance complexities

Tax compliance is one of the biggest ecommerce growth challenges for most businesses. Selling in different states, across different jurisdictions, and multiple sales channels can quickly become a huge administrative task when it comes to calculating and filing the correct sales tax.

There are also associated processing fees involved that need to be taken into account for proper filing. While all these are usually automated, having  tax software that can provide support a bit further than just automatic calculations can spell the difference between just staying compliant and being compliant and addressing other ecommerce growth challenges mentioned above.

Achieving Seamless Tax Compliance with Tax Automation Software

When evaluating tax automation software for your ecommerce business, it’s essential to look beyond just automatic tax calculations. A robust solution should also offer key features, such as:

• Calculate VAT and sales tax based on regularly updated rates
• Know liabilities and obligations for cross-border transactions, including shipping goods
• Simplify tax returns filing and file on your behalf
• Collect, verify, renew, and access tax documents on demand
• Provide guidance on how to effectively use the tools to streamline tax compliance processes

As a long-standing Shopify partner, Avalara has supported Shopify Plus customers with advanced tax calculation services. Now, Avalara offers seamless integration for Shopify merchants across all plans.

Avalara for Shopify is equipped to handle international tax calculation, including VAT, and provide supplementary solutions for tax return preparation, filing, and seamless exemption certificate management.

Using Avalara as tax automation software can help merchants:

• Save time: Avalara automatically updates tax calculations with frequent rate and rules changes
• Expand compliance coverage: Calculate taxes accurately across 13,000+ U.S. sales and use tax jurisdictions and 192 VAT jurisdictions worldwide.
• Streamline integrations: Break down silos by connecting Avalara with thousands of business applications, including Shopify.

Signing up with a tax automation software need not only let you achieve tax compliance, it should also help you achieve ecommerce growth. With Avalara, Shopify merchants can automate calculations, stay on top of compliance changes, and achieve an integrated business system.  Simplify tax compliance for your Shopify store. Avalara integrates seamlessly with Shopify to automate tax calculations, streamline returns, and help you stay compliant as your business grows. Learn more today.