How to Create an Ecommerce Go-to-Market Strategy (7 Steps)

What is a Go-to-Market strategy?

A Go-to-Market strategy is a detailed plan. One that describes how a business will:

Bring a new product or service to its target audience, or
Break into a new target market.

The strategy will cover all stages of this process, including:

Value proposition and differentiation
Messaging and competitive positioning
Pricing and promotional strategies
Distribution channels

A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is more focused than a marketing strategy. Specifically, it deals with new initiatives (like the aforementioned new products, or new attempts to break into different markets).

But there’s more.

A GTM strategy also lays out how you’ll continue to push the product post-launch. How you’ll work with customer success to make sure they’re able to support customers who get stuck, for example.

In ecommerce, this is especially important. That’s down to one of ecommerce’s biggest challenges: Low customer lifetime value (CLTV).

An ecommerce Go-to-Market strategy does everything a generic Go-to-Market strategy does. But it ties it all back to the unique challenges and processes that come with selling physical products online.

Benefits of building an ecommerce Go-to-Market strategy

Okay, but why do you need a Go-to-Market strategy in ecommerce?

Ecommerce is becoming more and more crowded. After all, what thriving business doesn’t have an online presence these days?

And more tools pop up every day. Tools that make it easier for other businesses to sell their stuff online. This lowers the barrier to entry and makes it easier for competitors to flood in.

A more crowded marketplace makes it harder to stand out.

Fancy jumping into that basket of snakes without a plan?

Neither would we.

Here are some other benefits of building a Go-to-Market strategy for your ecommerce business.

Mitigate risk
Optimize resource allocation
Maximize probability of success
Establish competitive advantage

1) Mitigate risk

If you were about to bungee jump, would you want the person overseeing the rope to tell you, “We don’t really have a plan for this. You just jump and we hope it all turns out okay.”?

Probably not, right?

You’d want some reassurance they’d done all they could to reduce the risks involved. That way, you can have fun and not worry. (At least, not too much.)

*If you were this guy, you'd want to know they had a plan, right?*

There’s always going to be some risk involved when you bring a new product to market. But you don’t want that risk any higher than necessary.

A solid action plan that accounts for all the things that could possibly go wrong at least minimizes risk.

2) Optimize resource allocation

Quick question.

Would you be happy if you never got a pay rise again?

Didn’t think so.

And the surest way to earn more is to have a measurable impact on your org’s bottom line.

Even if you succeed in aligning with all your relevant stakeholders, even if you pull the necessary teams together and get them collaborating cross-functionally… You must do it efficiently. Otherwise, you’ll waste company resources, and reduce your potential impact.

You want to maximize the impact you can have. That means being efficient in how you use the resources available to you, like other teams’ time, your budget, and the energy of the people working with you to make this launch happen.

A solid Go-to-Market strategy helps you achieve this.

3) Maximize the probability of success

You want to minimize risk. You want to operate efficiently. And you want to make it as likely as possible that you’ll launch to applause.

At least once in your career, you’ll have a launch that goes off like a lead balloon. If this has already happened to you, you’re probably pretty invested in it never happening again.

Having a plan helps you maximize your launch’s probability of success. But, crucially, it also gives you something to point to if things do go bad.

This does the following:

Helps you save face, since you can show you did your due diligence.
Acts as a record of your actions and their reasoning, so you can trace back what might have gone wrong, and learn for future launches.

4) Establish competitive advantage

You want to win. You want to succeed. And you want to maximize your probability of doing so. That’s tough to do if you don’t study your competitors.

You want to know what your competitors do well, and what they do poorly. What does your target audience think about them and their solutions? Where do they feel let down?

If there’s no space for you in the competitive environment, you have to question whether you’re going to succeed. But where there’s an unmet customer need, a pain point that competitors are failing to solve, you have a chance.

Knowing exactly what this need is, and how you can position yourself as the answer to it, is integral to success whenever you’re launching a new product.

But in your GTM plan? You can also outline your strategy for defending your competitive advantage against attacks from competitors. Once they see you capturing market share, they’re going to start reverse engineering your success. Having a plan for how you’ll deal with this and defend the customers you’ve begun winning over will help you get and stay ahead.

Main challenges of ecommerce

Okay, so having a Go-to-Market strategy is pretty important.

But how does all this relate to the world of ecommerce?

Let’s look at some of the biggest challenges you’ll face if you work in ecommerce. As well as how you might accommodate them in your GTM strategy.

Incentivizing repeat custom to increase CLTV.
Low conversion rates
Shopping cart abandonment
Inventory management
Returns and refunds

1) Low CLTV

A lot of ecommerce businesses struggle to bring customers back. Those customers are interested until they’ve purchased what they were looking for. Past that point, they’re no longer interested in the store.

As you’ll know, winning new customers is far more expensive than retaining existing ones. But in ecommerce, there’s typically no subscription model that sees customers pay a reliable, recurring fee every month. Nor is there a contract that keeps them (and their money) bound to you for a number of years.

Instead, it’s entirely transactional. When they need something, maybe they show up at your door. Or maybe they show up at one of your competitors’.

There are a number of solutions to this. You might consider building one of them into your ecommerce Go-to-Market strategy.

Ensuring amazing service

This one is perhaps the most obvious. The better the service you offer (especially when compared to your competitors), the more likely people will be to come back to you.

One way to ensure amazing service is to always strive to exceed customer expectations.

MyProtein, the European sports supplements vendor, was a great example in the early days of the company.

*European sports supplements vendor MyProtein used to have an excellent strategy for delighting their customers and boosting brand loyalty.*

You’d order from them and select Standard Delivery. Per their website, you’d expect your package to arrive in 3-5 business days. Instead, it’d show up at your door the next day. Even when it wasn’t a business day.

And inside? A free gift. Something you hadn’t ordered, and weren’t expecting.

Moments like this leave a strong emotional impression on your customers. You blow their expectations out of the water. As a result? You boost loyalty and retention. In turn, you boost repeat purchases and increase CLTV.

Atypical pricing model

While many customers will buy from you on a need-to-purchase basis, you can encourage other types of behavior.

In B2B, especially for suppliers of goods that enable other businesses to operate, you can set up trade pricing agreements. You can even set up these agreements on a per-partner basis.

In this way, a B2B ecommerce GTM strategy can start to incorporate elements of partner-led growth.

But you can also offer memberships to generate predictable revenue.

Customers might get a set number of perks for signing up:

Best pricing
Early access to new products
Members-only product drops
Invitations to exclusive member events

All these things will help you boost CLTV while giving customers more ways to get excited about your business.

2) Low conversion rates

Most ecommerce is self-serve and light-touch. Customers “browse” your online store. It’s mostly up to them to educate themselves about the products they need. Most won’t pick up the phone and call you if they’re having trouble deciding. They’ll simply leave the website.

This can be a problem. The vast majority of your website traffic won’t buy from you. Despite the fact that they’re in “ready to buy” mode.

Your Go-to-Market strategy has to deal with this. Make sure it’s as easy as possible for customers to find what they need, and decide between options.

The experience should be simple, with as little friction as possible.

3) Shopping cart abandonment

Another classic issue. A customer gets all the products into the cart… And then they bounce.

You were so close.

Recognizing how close the customer was to buying is crucial. So is acting on it.

Automated emails that remind customers they left items at checkout are super important. As is recognizing them if and when they return to the site, and making sure those same items are still there.

If they decide they need to sleep on their buying decision, and then return to your website, only to have to search for those same products again, you’re making the customer do more work. This flies in the face of marketing best practices.

Don’t make it harder for your customers to give you their money.

💡

Tip: If cart abandonment is particularly bad for you, you could consider offering a bonus 5-10% off in your reminder message, just to give your customers that extra push to get them over the line.

Other times, it’ll be because they’re not quite sold on the value of your product. Without context, price always seems too high. Raise your products’ perceived value with clear messaging and product descriptions that speak to your target audience’s most powerful emotional motivators.

4) Keeping physical inventory

When you have to hold onto physical inventory, you take on unavoidable risk.

First, there’s the risk of that inventory getting damaged.

If your warehouse floods? If there’s an electrical fire that damages your goods? You aren’t getting the value of those goods back. Even the best insurance policies might cover only some of the cost of restoring that inventory. Especially if they can prove you didn’t take some obscure measure to protect them. (Like storing your goods safely above flood level, for example).

Second, there’s the fact that you have to pay for that stock.

Many ecommerce businesses buy physical stock on lines of credit, assuming they’ll sell a percentage of it before they have to pay their debts. But if the state of the world changes, and suddenly demand for that stock dries up, they’ll be stuck with stock they can’t offload that no one wants. Worse, their income will stall, leaving them with expensive interest payments.

If you’re bringing a new physical product to market, managing the inventory risk and costs should be a part of your ecommerce Go-to-Market strategy.

5) Returns and refunds

When you’re selling physical products online, returns are a given.

Sometimes, customers order the wrong thing. It’s the wrong size, or they don’t like how it looks. Whatever the reason, you have to deal with it.

This is expensive, and your Go-to-Market strategy has to take this into account.

If you rush customers to the point of sale with amazing product offers that leave you with margin to spare on the initial sale, but don’t account for the percentage of purchases that’ll require a return and an exchange or refund, you’ll quickly find yourself in financial hot water.

How to create an ecommerce Go-to-Market strategy (in 7 simple steps)

There are at least nine main types of Go-to-Market strategy.

Which will suit you best? That depends on the particulars of your business.

But you can put together any Go-to-Market strategy with just seven simple steps:

Identify your target market
Identify your ICP
Nail down your value proposition and differentiation
Create strong messaging and positioning
Craft a pricing strategy
Brainstorm a promotional strategy
Decide on your sales and distribution channels

1) Identify your target market, TAM, and segmentation

We start from a thousand feet.

You need to identify, and understand, your target market before you do anything else.

As part of this step, you’ll think about your total addressable market (TAM). What’s the overall revenue potential in the space? And what portion of that TAM are you looking to capture?

You’ll need to figure out particular customer segments, too. This way, you can identify the most lucrative parts of your target audience. Then, you can tailor the rest of your Go-to-Market strategy to these people.

This maximizes your ability to transfer money from their pockets to yours, in exchange for the valuable products and services you offer.

2) Identify your ICP

Next, you’ll move from the very broad to the hyper specific.

You want to drill your customer segments down to an ICP (ideal customer profile). This is also known as building a customer persona.

We’ve plenty of detailed guides on this step, so read up on how to build your customer personas.

3) Value proposition and differentiation

When you understand your market, including its competitive landscape, and the segments and personas you’ll be serving, it’s time to get your differentiation down on paper.

This is where you define exactly what makes you different from your competitors.

Those unmet customer needs we spoke about before? This is where you nail down exactly how you meet them

In ecommerce, that could come down to your customers being motivated by convenience, and knowing that your competitors force customers to create an account before purchasing.

As part of your Go-to-Market strategy, you can make it a point to prioritize delivery speeds, transparent pricing, and a simple, easy checkout experience.

The sense of relief they’ll feel when they first shop with you will give you a fighting chance at winning market share away from your competitors.

4) Messaging and positioning that encapsulates your differentiation

With your differentiation distilled into a single sentence, you can finish crafting your positioning. Do this by creating company-wide guidelines for messaging.

Messaging means, how do you talk about your product? Both internally and to customers?

Customers want consistent messaging at every touchpoint. If your sales reps speak differently to customers about your products than your marketing reps do in their emails, you risk confusing customers. And confused customers don’t buy.

But your messaging needs to be more than just consistent. It needs to capture your differentiation. It needs to make clear the value your customers get from shopping with you.

5) Pricing strategy

As an ecommerce business, there are many possible pricing models you can use:

Loss-leader pricing
Competitive pricing strategies
Premium pricing
Penetration pricing
Dynamic pricing

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but they’re some of the most popular (and most effective) pricing strategies for ecommerce businesses.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Loss-leader

This is where you sell a desirable, in-demand product at a loss intentionally. Why? To get customers through the door and buying other things. It’s on those other things you make your profit.

This is what supermarkets do with products like bread and milk. They intentionally price them lower than they’d wish. Then, they place them at the far end of the store.

To get them to the checkouts, you have to walk past every other aisle in the store. Twice. By the time you’re at checkout, you’ve picked up a couple of snacks, a seasonal offer, and remembered that you could do with some more fabric conditioner.

Competitive pricing

A competitive pricing model uses competitors’ products as a benchmark. You price yours similar to theirs.

While every business should be aware of their competitors’ pricing, where possible, it’s not always the best idea to stick to it. Price is one of the clearest ways of differentiating yourself from your competitors, after all.

Premium pricing

Price can affect perception. And putting your prices up can, actually, increase sales.

When your product is excellent, with no obvious downside, and is priced lower than people expect, they’ll ask, “What’s the catch?”

Where they can’t see one, they’ll often think, “This is too good to be true.” End result? They don’t buy.

Premium pricing strategies avoid this.

Penetration pricing

Businesses adopt a penetration pricing strategy when they’re trying to expand into a new market. They price their products lower than those of their competitors until they’ve won a certain percentage of the market share. At this point, they start to ramp prices up slowly.

This offsets the inherent disadvantage of entering a new space where no one knows you, without forever curtailing your profits.

Dynamic pricing

This is a particularly popular ecommerce pricing strategy.

Ecommerce businesses often calculate their dynamic pricing algorithmically. Since it’s rare for ecommerce businesses to hide their prices, they’ll frequently scrape their competitors’ prices.

This prevents competitors from employing sneaky tactics without them knowing. Like undercutting them when they know there’s going to be a surge of demand for a commodity product, for example.

Whichever pricing strategy you choose for your ecommerce Go-to-Market plan, remember that you want to foster good will and loyalty with your customer base. Maximizing your per-sale margins isn’t always the best long-term strategy.

6) Promotional strategy

Promotional strategy is another essential component of any Go-to-Market plan in ecommerce.

It answers the question: How will you reach your customers where they are?

You have to, of course, communicate your marketing promotions to people. Before that, you have to make sure your target customers know your launch is coming – period.

Which will you use?

Email marketing
Social media
Content marketing
Paid advertising

All of these are options. Most important is that you meet your customers where they already are. If they’re all LinkedIn-using millennials, you might not want to use TikTok.

If you know a disproportionate amount of your user base uses Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you might want to pay for ads there, where competition is lower than in the ads section of Google search.

7) Sales & distribution channels (fulfillment platforms)

Finally (and this is a big one), we come to your sales and distribution channels.

In ecommerce, sales are usually self-service. Customers will browse your products online and make decisions based on their own research.

But, though they might not want to interact with a salesperson, this doesn’t mean you can’t influence their buying behavior.

If customers are doing their research by reading articles and reviews, for example, it’ll pay to feature customer reviews on your product pages. It’ll also pay to have informative articles about the products you sell on your site.

That way, customers don’t end up on a competitor’s website, learning all about why product X will meet their needs better than product Y. (And, conveniently, product X is currently on offer. Snap it up now!)

One of the biggest factors in making your GTM strategy successful

Perhaps the biggest element of this part of your GTM strategy, though, is choosing an ecommerce platform.

Sure, you can build an online shop from scratch. If you’ve got a talented, large in-house dev team with time to kill, maybe that’d make sense.

But most startups don’t. If that’s you, there are services out there you can outsource all this work to.

Services like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce charge a monthly fee in exchange for many of the bells and whistles you’d normally associate with online stores.

Remember cart abandonment? Well, services like Shopify have a feature where you can automatically email customers a link to their abandoned cart.

They’ll also do things like automatically adjusting regional pricing and taxes. Take VAT in the UK, for example. This is something consumers have to pay for. To give them the best experience, you need to calculate it for them at checkout. Otherwise, your UK-based customers get hit with an additional 20% fee on top of what they’ve already paid once the product lands.

Other considerations when choosing an ecommerce platform:

Aside from baked-in features, when considering your ecommerce platform, you’ll want to think about:

How much will you be able to scale with this platform?
How expensive will it be to switch down the line if you need to?
How well does it integrate with other tools and software?

Integrations are particularly important. Some ecommerce platforms might not integrate with your marketing automation service, your CRM, or other tools in your tech stack.

It’s essential the one you choose does. Why? You want to be able to trace purchases back to particular market campaigns. This way, you know what works and what doesn’t. This helps you fine-tune your strategy.

3 Practical tricks for making the most of your ecommerce GTM strategy

Okay, so you’ve got the playbook. You know the benefits and the primary challenges involved with creating and implementing a Go-to-Market strategy in ecommerce.

Here are some more practical tips and handy tricks that’ll keep you on the right track.

• Gather data and market feedback

Remember that any good plan isn’t one-and-done.

Industries change. Markets change. You and your plan need to change with them if you’re to keep up.

Gather feedback, and plug it back into the system as you go. Use it to iterate and improve your plan based on the feedback your customers and the market are giving you.

Remember, too, that a big part of success is knowing if you’re on track or not. And you can’t do that without setting the right targets. Set KPIs you and your key teams can align on.

• Distribution platforms

Your distribution platform (even if you decide to build your own in-house online store) is crucial. It’s the part of your infrastructure that’ll take the biggest beating, in terms of:

Traffic
Purchases
Scrutiny

This is the point through which all the money flows. Issues here could cost you a lot of money.

Plus, choosing the wrong platform at the beginning could lead to you having to switch down the line, which won’t be fast, cheap, or easy.

• What’s your revenue model?

Beyond your pricing model, think about an overall revenue model.

One that takes into account things like:

“Frequently bought with this…” and other pre- and at-checkout upsells
Loyalty schemes to incentivize customers to come back and spend more with you
Promotions and flash sales that boost your marketing and email datasets

There are all sorts of ways you can leverage new products to boost your profit margins. Start thinking about them early, and incorporate them into your GTM strategy to maximize both early buy-in and their impact down the line.

Go-to-Market Motions Playbook

🚨 Warning: May cause disruptive demand for your products.

Think bringing a product to market is challenging?

Wait 'til you have to deal with the demand using the right Go-to-Market Motion will generate.

In this playbook:

Discover the building blocks (motions) that’ll help you craft a successful Go-to-Market strategy wherever you’re working, whatever you’re selling. 🧱
Stop struggling with the wrong methods. Start bringing your products to market in the way that’s right for your product and your org. ✅
We unveil methods that’ll get your user base growing organically, as if on its own. 🌳

Are you ready to deal with the demand? 🫵

I promise, I'm ready!

A guide to ecommerce Go-to-Market strategy for online businesses

Alex Walton