Managing Your Ecommerce Budget
This is part of a 5 part series on setting your ecommerce budget for 2023. Discover strategies to improve your ecommerce business and drive growth.
Part 5 of Setting Your Ecommerce Budget for 2023
This is part of a 5 part series on setting your ecommerce budget for 2023. For an easier to read all-in-one PDF of the entire series,download our Setting Your Ecommerce Budget for 2023 guide .
Setting your budget is just the start. Financial planning tools like QuickBooks (opens in new tab) and Anaplan (opens in new tab) can make it easier to track actual versus budgeted spend in real time. It’s always important to monitor your actual spending versus budget and projections throughout the year, but in 2023 it will be increasingly vital - economic conditions especially in the later half of 2023 may be greatly different than what you originally projected and may require you to revise your budget to one of the other scenarios you had looked at for 2023.
It’s also important to consider what happens if your actual revenue trends much higher than you originally projected. Oftentimes companies hit unexpected growth and try to maximize the short-term profit by holding their ecommerce budget at the original numbers they set when they were expecting substantially less ecommerce revenue. This almost always backfires - when you experience a large increase in revenue you’re also going to start seeing a greater need to invest in the systems that support your ecommerce revenue. So, keep an eye on not just your budgeted expenses but also your projected versus actual revenue throughout the year and don’t be afraid to have a conversation with your CFO about increasing your ecommerce budget if revenues grow faster than anticipated and you see a way to capitalize on that growth through greater spending on ecommerce projects.
Finally, once 2023 winds down and before you start thinking about your 2024 budget, spend some time reflecting on how accurate your 2023 projections and budget were. Recap the year, where investments you made paid off and which ones might have gone unexpectedly under or over budget or not delivered the results you expected. An hour spent thinking through these items and how you might have approached budgeting for 2023 differently if you had known these things in advance can help you develop an even stronger plan for setting your ecommerce budget for 2024.
Explore more in our Ecommerce Operations Hub — resources for ecommerce budgeting, tech stack audits, and strategic planning.