If you’re like most eCommerce business owners, you’re always looking for ways to improve your operations and make your business more profitable. And there is one area that may be worth exploring in this regard – time tracking. ⏱️
Careful and accurate time tracking can save you thousands of dollars, increase efficiency, and help you stay ahead of the competition.
So, let’s take a closer look at why it’s important to track time in your eCommerce store, the challenges you may face during the process, and how to overcome them effectively.
✨ How Time Tracking Can Help Your eCommerce Business
- Time is money – This old adage has never been truer than in the world of eCommerce. By tracking the time you spend on various tasks, you can see if and where you’re wasting your precious resources and make changes to boost efficiency.
- Stay on schedule – In the fast-paced world of online retail, it’s important to keep up with your schedule and meet deadlines. Time tracking can help you stay on top of your to-do list and avoid falling behind.
- Improve customer satisfaction – Happy customers are essential for any business, but they can be especially difficult to please in the eCommerce world. By keeping a detailed record of time invested in customer service tasks, you can identify areas where you need to make improvements to better serve your clients.
- Make data-driven decisions – Perhaps the most important reason to track time is to make data-driven decisions about your business. By understanding how you spend your time, you can allocate resources more effectively in a way that drives business growth.
- Keep tabs on remote team performance – As an employer in online commerce, you might have a team member in a different time zone, remote employees, or someone whose job requires them to work odd hours. Time tracking can help you keep tabs on everyone’s work hours, make sure they are productive, and work the right amount of time every day.
💣 Main Challenges of eCommerce Time Tracking
- Employee monitoring – Time tracking can be viewed as a Big Brother-esque invasion of privacy by employees. If they feel like they’re being constantly monitored, it could provoke distrust and resentment.
- Unnecessary complexity – Some time tracking systems are complex and time-consuming to set up. And if time tracking isn’t done properly, it could end up being more of a hindrance than a help.
- The risk of human error – No matter how accurate the system is, if someone doesn’t input the data correctly, it could throw the whole thing off course.
🔑 How to Make Time Tracking Work
The above challenges can become a major source of frustration when it comes to eCommerce time tracking. However, these challenges are 100% avoidable.
Just follow the easy steps described below to ensure you’re making the best out of time tracking and use it to your greatest advantage:
1. Avoid excessive employee monitoring
Employee monitoring and automated activity tracking may be truly helpful in some cases. For instance, when your remote team members continually fail to meet the set deadlines and often complete fewer tasks than it was initially planned, employee monitoring can shed some light on why that’s happening.
However, when you don’t have severe problems with staff performance, this approach can actually backfire and lead to decreased productivity:
- When employees feel like they’re constantly being watched, they tend to become stressed and anxious, which can lead to mistakes and errors.
- In addition, employees who feel like they can’t take a break or step away from their desks for a few minutes are more likely to burn out quickly.
So, if you want your eCommerce business to thrive, try to avoid solutions for employee monitoring. Instead, choose an automated time tracker that doesn’t randomly take screenshots of users’ workstations or keep a detailed log of all the websites they visit throughout the day. Such a time tracker will help you to create a healthier and more supportive work environment where employees feel trusted and valued.
2. Choose a simple time tracker
When it comes to eCommerce time tracking, simplicity is key. However, there are dozens of options on the market, and each one comes with its own set of features and complexities.
Your goal is to find a system that strikes the right balance between simplicity and power. It should be intuitive enough so that your team members will actually use it consistently, but it should also offer the features you need to get meaningful insights into your work.
Some valuable features to look for in a time tracker include progress tracking, cost monitoring, performance reports, and time off management. In combination with time tracking itself, they will help you ensure that your work process runs smoothly from start to finish and that your team management needs are addressed.
3. Analyze the collected data to drive efficiency
There’s one simple rule that applies to every business: the more time you can save on tasks, the more money you can make. That’s why it’s essential to analyze the data collected from time tracking and actually apply it to decision-making.
By seeing how your employees are spending their time, you can identify areas where efficiency can be improved. For example, you may find that your customer service team is spending too much time on the phone. Look at the data closer, talk to your team, and you will determine how to route calls more efficiently or offer self-service options to reduce call volume.
4. Explain the importance of accurate time tracking to employees
As you can see, there are many good reasons to track time in an eCommerce business. Yet if your employees don’t see time tracking as something useful and are reluctant to keep a record of their working hours, the benefits of the practice will somewhat be reduced. And to avoid that, it’s vital to educate employees on the importance of accurate time tracking.
By clearly communicating the benefits of careful time tracking, businesses can help employees to see how their efforts contribute to overall team productivity and the bottom line. And when employees have a clear understanding of the impacts their work has, they’re more likely to be motivated to do their best.
Make the Most of Your Time (and Money) with actiTIME
If you’re looking for a time tracking solution for your eCommerce business, you should definitely check out actiTIME. It’s one of the most popular options on the market, and here are a few reasons why:
- Its interface is intuitive and easy to use, so you won’t need to spend hours training your employees on how to use it.
- And if you’re worried about employee monitoring, don’t be. actiTIME doesn’t spy on employees or track their online activity. Instead, it provides powerful reporting, team management, and cost tracking functionality that will help you get the most out of your team.
- Plus, the automated timers in the Chrome extension and the mobile app make it super easy to track time accurately, even when you’re away from the desk.
- And if there are some features you don’t plan to use, you can easily switch them off. In other words, actiTIME is totally customizable to fit your specific needs.
Another great news, actiTIME offers a free 30-day trial during which you can check it out before you commit. So, why not give actiTIME a shot? You won’t be disappointed.
