Outsource Ecommerce Support to Scale Small Businesses

Outsourcing can help small retail businesses scale faster than ever. When companies outsource ecommerce support, they can focus on their core competencies while providing superior service to their customers. Ecommerce support outsourcing can also help boost customer loyalty, increase order volume, and generate more revenue for local retailers.

Our client is an online marketing platform that shows how businesses can thrive by outsourcing ecommerce customer support. With a network of over 170,000 local retailers across the United States, Canada, the UK, and Europe, it is a vital bridge that connects independent retailers with global wholesalers. It provides small businesses with the tools they need to thrive.

But this kind of growth doesn’t happen overnight. It also requires more than a strong technology platform. Our client recognized that they needed an ecommerce support outsourcing partner dedicated to operational excellence and community success. So they turned to Hugo. Together, we helped onboard over 50,000 brands–and here’s how we did it.

A Global Platform for Small Retailers

The platform was built to serve the ecommerce underdog. In a world dominated by retail giants like Amazon and Walmart, independent businesses were being left behind. The founders saw a critical need to fill the gap between these independent businesses and the wholesalers of unique, high-quality products – not mass-produced goods – that could help them stand out and build loyal customer bases.

So they built a platform to provide this ecommerce support. By connecting small retailers with a global pool of curated vendors, they empowered these businesses to create vibrant storefronts. Using the platform, businesses could grow and become competitive in the modern ecommerce retail space.

When the platform approached us for assistance with outsourced ecommerce support, we rose to the occasion.

Streamlining Marketplace Operations

Recognizing the need for operational scalability, we helped them outsource ecommerce support to scale their marketplace operations. Hugo’s mission was to ensure that onboarding new brands and managing product listings were efficient and effective. We tackled the challenge by strategically managing the catalog digitization process.

The team’s efforts resulted in the following transformative outcomes:

• Record-Breaking Onboarding: Hugo successfully integrated 1,800 brands onto the platform in one month, marking a 700% increase since the early days.
• Comprehensive Brand Onboarding: Hugo’s meticulous approach facilitated onboarding over 50,000 brands, expanding the choices available for independent retailers.
• Catalog Content Revitalization: Over 20,000 brand content updates were carried out, ensuring retailers and their customers access the most accurate and engaging product information.
• Product Information Excellence: The Hugo team reviewed and updated the taxonomy for over 1 million products, enhancing the buyer’s ability to make informed decisions swiftly.

This innovative approach involved adopting cutting-edge workflow optimization and data management techniques, which elevated its operations. It also proved critical to marketplace health. Cleaner catalogs meant better discoverability. Better content meant higher conversion. And improved taxonomy meant happier retailers and end-customers.

Much of this success stemmed from Hugo’s ability to optimize workflows and apply automation where it mattered most. They weren’t just executing tasks — they were improving how those tasks got done.

Enhancing Operational Excellence with Outsourcing

In addition to streamlining back-end operations, we helped undergo direct enhancements to frontline vendor support and other operations to assist with outsourcing ecommerce customer support.

At the time, their own support teams were overwhelmed in addressing ticket volume. They faced two primary hurdles:

• Poor catalog organization meant agents needed to work on guiding users to relevant products.
• Low-integrity listings generated confusion, requiring one-off resolutions.

This burden pulled support teams into an inefficient reactive mode, unable to nurture the vendor ecosystem proactively. Morale suffered, and turnover grew.

By outsourcing ecommerce customer support solutions on both fronts, the platform could ease these strains through preventative catalog improvements, while also providing supplementary CX teams.

As part of this strategy to alleviate the burden on in-house teams, self-service functions were recommended and implemented. This reduced basic contacts while sharing institutional knowledge to prevent duplicate issues.

Soon, their teams could shift focus from fighting fires to long-term relationship-building, partnering with Hugo to uplift the marketplace community. This approach also produced significant process improvements:

• Optimized Assessment Tool: The development of a ranking tool by Hugo boosted throughput and accuracy by 40%, enabling quicker and more precise vendor onboarding.
• Resolved Complex Inquiries: Having settled over 2,200 complex Shopify tickets, Hugo developed a robust, self-learning mechanism for FAQs to feed into the platform’s self-service functionality.

By elevating both sides in parallel, Hugo reinforced two pillars that uphold the marketplace experience, empowering vendors/retailers and setting the stage for long-term customer satisfaction.

When You Outsource Ecommerce Support the Right Way

Our client didn’t just outsource blindly. They made a strategic decision to outsource ecommerce support in a way that improved the entire customer journey, from backend operations to customer-facing service.

Support teams were struggling. Catalog disorganization meant agents had to manually guide users through messy listings. Low-quality product info led to confusion. And a high ticket volume kept the team in constant firefighting mode.

Hugo stepped in again, this time with a dual focus: prevent problems and provide direct customer support. Our solutions included:

• Reorganizing product catalogs to prevent common issues
• Implementing self-service tools to reduce low-value contacts
• Sharing institutional knowledge to eliminate duplicate tickets
• Supplementing internal teams with trained ecommerce support agents

The result? Agents could stop reacting to chaos and start proactively building relationships with vendors and customers.

An Ongoing Commitment to Shared Success

This collaboration reflects a shared commitment to empowering local retailers: “With Hugo’s help, we’re creating a fairer retail economy,” says Elisa. “Local businesses now have a fighting chance to follow their dreams.”

Through strategic outsourcing, it expanded its operational capabilities and reinforced its foundation for future growth, ensuring local businesses can confidently compete in a challenging market.

Today, the platform is valued at over $12 billion. “This is just the beginning. With partners like Hugo, we are determined to revolutionize retail–proving independent businesses can survive and thrive together.”

Discover how Hugo’s ecommerce support outsourcing can support your brand’s goals. From customer support to trust and safety, digital operations, and data and AI, our solutions scale with you and set you up for success. Contact us today.