On Starting An eCommerce Consulting Business And Helping Over 300+ Businesses

Stefan Chiriacescu

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Published: July 10th, 2022

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Stefan Chiriacescu

Founder, eCommerce Today Agency

Founders

Employees

eCommerce Today A...

ecommerce-today.com

from Brasov

started September 2019

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

platform

WooCommerce

Klaviyo

Omnisend

MailChimp

customer service

FAQ by Aheadw...

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Discover what books Stefan recommends to grow your business!

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (... Jim Collins

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Sam Walton: Made In America Sam Walton

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Hi! My name is Stefan Chiriacescu and I am the founder and CEO of eCommerce Today.

We are an ecommerce managed services company. We help business owners with consulting and staffing for their business and with our innovative service anyone can have a professional eCommerce team at their disposal.

We went from having 1 client in 2014, to 3 in 2015 and that number just grew exponentially! Today we’ve helped over 300 businesses and are actively working with over 70 owners on growing their online sales.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

My agency grew organically - I started my own eCommerce business in 2010/2011 and had to learn eCommerce and especially Magento with the help of Google and forums.

That business flourished, and in 2014 I sold it and started doing eCommerce consulting, but I quickly found that business owners had the same problems I had before and solved: insufficient knowledge (and learning from mistakes is expensive) and insufficient staffing (and hiring the wrong people is expensive).

So I started Managed Services, helping business owners not only with advice but also with actually getting the job done.

In 2019, I founded eCommerce-Today.com and started building a team and a network of partners. Back then we had a handful of clients and today we help manage more than 60 businesses from around the world, with 70% of our clients from North America, 20% from Europe, and 10% from Asia, Australia, and Africa.

Our success lies in the fact that we are neither a web development company, nor a digital advertising agency, nor just a Shopify agency - we bring everything together under one roof, and our clients can get the right help they need for their own store.

Take us through the process of designing your services

In the beginning I took on the role of eCommerce and Business Development Manager for most of our new clients. I was wearing many hats, managing vendors, products, overlooking marketing and my team was implementing all fixes based on my direction. This helped us isolate key areas that would allow us to standardize and define core services, and create procedures.

There were no startup costs per say as the business grew while our budgets increased. I was leveraging my time as the main driver for growth, working 80-100-120 hour weeks :). Any costs that appeared along the way were bootstrapped with most profits being reinvested in growing the team, getting better services.

We price our services based on hourly packages. Our clients can “hire” us to work on their business full time, part time, or ultra part time based on their needs. Our business makes money, honestly, as our clients grow. Typically, in the starting stages we spend a lot of extra time researching, finding strategies, testing and implementing.

This takes a lot of resources. As we progress past this stage, we’re able to go into tasks that can be streamlined - and everything is smoother. As the business grows, the clients get more hours with us for implementation, testing, and optimizing the businesses and thus our business with that client grows and becomes profitable.

We’ve built our website out of a whim - we didn’t need it for marketing purposes as our client base was growing organically, based on referrals. Building the website was however a very good step as it allowed for further organize and standardize our services..

Describe the process of launching the business.

We officially launched the business in 2019 altough it had existed for more than 5 years in a different format. We had to think about the location of the business, taxes, fixed costs, hiring process, human resources management, advanced accounting and more.

We chose to locate the business in Romania, within the European Union so that we’re familiarized with taxation and requirements and externalized Accounting and Human Resources in the beginning as the volume of paperwork was not that high. Also, all work was done remotely so we did not need to rent an office space.

We conduct monthly usability, SEO, and catalog audits and regularly research the competition. Based on our monthly research, we propose tasks, and once the client agrees, we work to implement them.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Our main argument is competent adaptability. Since we work with many CMSs and hundreds of third-party vendors, we know how best to connect them and what combinations make sense depending on the company's structure.

Our clients get an e-commerce manager, an UX specialist, a data scientist, an email marketing expert, a digital advertising team, and a graphic designer, regardless of how many hours they have available per month.

When we work with a new client, we always perform a free audit to understand what the true requirements are. Customers rarely know exactly what they want, and even if they do, it can easily turn out not to be their top priority.

To give an example: We get requests from store owners who want to improve the speed of their store to drive more sales - but in 99% of cases, their stores are not optimized for UX, they do not have sales funnels, and their digital advertising efforts are completely unnecessary. We analyze their stores and offer a solution and a gameplan.

The first job we do with a new client is always a one-time job. We do not start recurring plans with a client until we have had a chance to get to know the client and understand their business. We also want the client to see us in action and get a better understanding of what we do.

Once we complete an initial job, we propose a recurring plan where the client gets 20, 40 or 80 hours per month, is assigned an account manager, establishes a list of goals and milestones, and works toward their completion.

Our team then gets the job done, ensuring that the quality of work and level of service are exceptional.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

This year we started a new project, software development. We recently released our first app on the Shopify App Store and are almost done with our second, which should be online in the next few weeks.

In the near future we'll develop more useful apps, services and reporting tools that we've developed internally and that we know store owners need.

Today, I spend a lot of time improving our internal procedures and implementing new ones so that our operations run smoothly and our core business, Managed Services, can continue to grow.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The timing could not be better to start an eCommerce agency. Set yourself up for long hours, set yourself up for interesting problems.

Procedures come first - as the owner of an agency, I had to answer 3-400 emails a day and work on specific tasks. I can not stress enough that I should have started developing procedures and scaling the business from day one. This is definitely the key to a successful business for agencies.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Wow, we use so many!

CMSes: Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, CounterPoint, RunIt
Email Marketing: Klaviyo, Omnisend, MailChimp, DotMailer, Springbot, Constant Contact, NCR Customer Connect, MailGun, MageMail, Mandrill, iContact, Sendgrid, JustUno
Omnichannel: ChannelAdvisor, M2EPro, GoDataFeed
Fulfilment: ShipStation, ShipperHQ, ShipWorks, Zonos, Authorize.net, SagePay, NCR Secure Pay, Braintree, PayPal, Sezzle, Klarna, Afterpay, Sygnifyd, Kount, Asana, Teamwork
Analytics, Security & Webmaster: Google (Merchant Center, Tag Manager, Search Console, Analytics, Developer Tools), Bing Webmaster Tools, Facebook (Business Manager, Developer Tools), Pingdom, Cloudflare, AWS
Various: Shopper Approved, TrustPilot, BBB, Klevu, Criteo, AdRoll, Algolia, Olark, Hotjar, Pointy, Blackbaud, and so many more!

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Reading right now: Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins
Recently Read: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, Made in America by Sam Walton, Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

The timing could not be better to start an eCommerce agency. Set yourself up for long hours, set yourself up for interesting problems.

Build your business around procedures, do not try to build it around yourself. Find replacements for your employees as soon as possible.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We're always looking for new colleagues. We hire new colleagues every 4-6 months and send an email to those who've registered on our careers page or follow our agency on Linkedin.

We usually hire juniors and train them from A to Z so they can first learn how we work and then add their own touch once they start helping clients and manages businesses. Our business and processes grow as our team grows.