Opening an online store can bring a growth wall. That can happen after building a foundation with solid product planning and search engine optimisation (SEO). It can also come after expanding display shelves across multiple channels and putting the basic structure of a startup in place. The expectation that "if the product is good, it will sell itself" can feel like a mistake.

A business cannot grow quickly by opening a store and simply waiting for customers. This is when a marketing strategy is needed.

The basics of drawing customers’ attention and getting them to open their wallets is a good product. A sophisticated marketing strategy is also seen as an essential factor. The problem is that e-commerce marketing is becoming more intense by the day and has become an area that requires advanced expertise. For first-time founders, analysing algorithms by advertising channel, setting targeting and reading performance data is too difficult.

Some consider using a professional advertising agency. But the minimum monthly advertising spending required by agencies is burdensome for micro businesses. They are in a "marketing blind spot". As a result, early-stage founders or small businesses end up relying on their "gut". They burn through hard-won advertising budgets and suffer bitter failures.

A March 2024 survey by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups showed that founders’ top management difficulty was promotion and marketing, at 50.5 percent, allowing multiple answers. It ranked higher than securing sales channels, at 44.5 percent, and an economic slowdown, at 33.0 percent. The results offer a glimpse of how much trouble early-stage businesses face due to a lack of marketing expertise.

◆Competing with a "system," not gut instinct... finding hidden sales with marketing systems

Cafe24 has launched its "Cafe24 Pro (PRO) service" to help first-time founders escape marketing blind spots. The service incorporates marketing experts’ know-how and the results of analyses of accumulated customer success data over several years. It handles the full process, from choosing marketing programmes and producing ad creative to selecting media, allocating budgets and managing performance. For early-stage founders or small business owners without marketing expertise or creative production skills, it can have the same effect as working with a veteran performance marketer.

The Cafe24 Pro marketing service allows the strategies of proven marketing experts to be applied immediately to each brand’s environment. The system analyses actual sales data and click-through rates for each brand’s store to find hidden "winner products" with high potential. It then applies targeting methods and proven strategies that delivered the best results by industry to six major advertising platforms, including Meta, Google and Naver. The system handles strategy-setting and budget allocation to raise business efficiency.

It also significantly lowers barriers to entering marketing. Online businesses that spend at least 330,000 won a month on advertising effectively have a growth fast track to deploy sophisticated data-driven marketing.

The power of a system combined with experts’ know-how is being proven with actual data. During a pilot operation period, a beauty brand identified as company B that adopted Pro marketing moved away from its previous approach of pouring advertising spending only into flagship products based on the owner’s intuition. Instead, it entrusted strategy to a system that analyses the store’s sales volume and conversion rate data. As a result, high-potential products were discovered, driving the number of buyers up 64.5 percent and brand sales up 84.9 percent.

Son Ha-jung (손하정), CEO of the children’s clothing brand Muchamuchattio, said, "At first, I had no marketing knowledge and could not produce clear results." She said, "After introducing the Pro marketing service, high-quality ads were produced using only the product images we had, and we were able to manage things systematically. It reduced the marketing burden and allowed us to focus fully on running the brand."

◆Onsite marketing should capture customers hesitating at the cart

Support from marketing systems does not end with off-site marketing that brings customers in from external media. Letting hard-won customers leave the store empty-handed is no different from pouring water into a bottomless jar.

Cafe24 Pro has put together an onsite marketing system. A key example is the addition of features within the Pro service through cooperation with AlphaPush, an onsite marketing solution for online stores.

AlphaPush is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution drawing attention from online businesses. It provides functions that create touchpoints with store visitors and link them to purchases through onsite pop-ups, push alerts and message campaigns. In particular, it is gaining word-of-mouth among businesses using platforms such as Cafe24 Store for its technical capability to analyse customer behaviour data in real time and display customised messages at the right timing.

Onsite campaigns automatically run three product recommendations depending on the customer’s stage of visiting the store. First-time visitors see the top 3 bestselling products over the past 30 days. Customers who have viewed different products at least 3 times and are hesitating are shown products that other customers bought frequently. Customers who have completed registration are shown 6 popular products to link them to a first purchase. Products are automatically selected based on sales data, so operators do not need separate management.

A coupon issuance function that raises purchase conversion can also be used. Online businesses can display a coupon pop-up to customers who are about to leave after putting items in their cart, or who repeatedly view the same product at least 3 times, to lift conversion rates. Coupon amounts can be freely adjusted on the admin page.

Time and resources for early-stage founders are limited. Staying up all night studying algorithms to become a performance marketer is not the essence of business. Founders should focus on core tasks such as finding better products, refining the brand’s story and raising customer satisfaction.

Entrusting difficult and complex marketing to an expert system that has learned from the success data of millions of shopping malls is a certain and new success formula for online startups to scale up their business size.