When adding an online store, it is not enough to create an online sales department.
Too many people believe that to enter the business of online sales, it is enough to add a new department to our company, with sufficient staff and resources.
On many occasions, the personnel of said department even sign up with some other company, to incorporate people with experience in online sales.
The result is a new business division, which starts up independently, isolated from the rest, with its own resources and whose staff has little relationship with the rest of the company.
But this approach does not usually work well. After making a more or less great effort and investment, the results obtained do not usually compensate the costs or at least not enough.
It is necessary to carry out an internal reorganization in the company.
It is good that there are personnel specifically dedicated to the new store, it may even be a good idea to incorporate a professional from another company who already has experience in similar topics. But they must work closely with the rest of the company, so not everyone can be new, we must rely on the staff that is already in the company.
This requires a strategic redesign of the new organization, especially in some departments. For example, the sales division, which should have a single leadership and unique objectives, but which happens to have two different operational sections. The same happens with the Customer Service department, which must have resources for physical care and for online care.
On the other hand, you have to consider the departments that provide support. Take for example logistics, which now has to satisfy the two sales departments, the physical and the online. It will be necessary to increase its size, of course, but above all it will be necessary to modify its.
Also you must designate work teams for different areas, in addition to different roles (by workteam or user). Also it could be interesting to automatize some tasks through tools like BPM’s (Business Process Modelers).
