Diversify and automate ecommerce to buck the trend in 2025

In this post, Volo’s outgoing CEO Paul ‘Dilge’ Dilger outlines why serious ecommerce players need to diversify where they sell and automate unproductive processes in order to see increases in profitability in what will be a year of consolidation.

I recently sent a note to our customers, explaining that I was stepping down as CEO to focus 100% on expanding our community of sellers, closing with these comments: “The signs are that this will be a year of modest ecommerce growth and challenging conditions for employers. The way to buck this trend is to diversify into new, emerging and less competitive online channels and to use more of the Volo platform (Origin and Vision) to automate manual processes and tasks, while getting the insights into where you need to invest.”

Let’s unpack this a little more. Alongside the upcoming increase in employer NIC rate contributions, a good place to start for the likely macro conditions is the recent Metapack-sponsored Benchmark Delivery Report 2025. 46% of consumers plan to increase their visits to physical stores, while only 31% plan to increase their online purchases. The online sellers that actually grew (84% of them) only grew by 5.6% last year.

Diversify to Rectify

Maturing markets are by their nature more competitive and less profitable than emerging or growing markets. The same goes for online channels. This is why it makes sense to seek out additional channels, for a bunch of reasons:

• You expand your customer base, because you access new audiences and attract additional customer segments
• You increase your brand awareness, because you have more visibility and recognition among the customers who are searching for your products
• You increase sales, because you’re not reliant on one channel
• You increase resilience, because if you get a problem on that one channel, or even your main channel, you can recover

While ‘multichannel’ selling offers these benefits, it can also introduce complexities in managing inventory, orders, and customer service. This is where automation becomes indispensable.

Automation translates to bottom-line benefits

Even if you only sell on one online channel, manual processes are a drain on productivity. When you’re doing the same manual things on multiple channels, then it’s easy to see how business can quickly cease to be fun. Automation leverages software to perform repetitive tasks, reducing human intervention and the potential for errors, and that gives you these kids of benefits:

• You improve your efficiency, since automation is taking care of routine tasks more quickly and accurately
• You reduce your operational costs, because of the efficiency factor we just noted
• You improve your accuracy, which leads to, yes, greater efficiency and happier customers who get what they ordered
• You increase productivity, because you’re doing more with less

Doing these two things – diversify; automate – positively affects both your top line and your bottom line. Diversification increases your revenues and automation allows you retain higher net margins because you’ve improved your costs of running your business, from supply through to demand. This means you’re not just growing your business, you’re scaling it, which is the key to long-term profitability.

In an economic environment where slow or negligible growth looks like being the order of the year, rather than the order of the day, the winners tend to invest so they can keep moving, while the losers tend to freeze so that they can stay still.

Get in touch to open the discussion on ‘diversify’ and ‘automate’.