Ka Hao i Te Ao - eCommerce journey

Ka Hao i Te Ao - eCommerce journey

The momentum of doing a weekly TAHA blog has slipped by the wayside and its now been over two weeks since the last blog. Rather than put pressure on doing a weekly blog, a more flexible and adaptable approach is being taken and the blog will appear whenever its ready to appear.

In taking this approach and thinking about what to blog on there has been reflection on the old adage of you never stop learning, evolving and adapting or as is said, changing. For some it's hard to change or realise the need for change. For others change just seems natural and is a normal part of their evolvement. And so it is with business, the ability to evolve your business is imperative. It is easy to get stuck doing the same old same old. This is something we’ve been a bit guilty of here at TAHA. 

 
But it’s one thing knowing you have to change, it's another thing actually making change. For example, we’ve known for a long time that TAHA needed to be up to speed with e-commerce. Sure, we had a website and people could purchase our product through the website. But that was it, we did absolutely nothing to encourage people to visit our website. The site just sat there static and stagnant. Yet all this time we knew that having a strong digital presence was necessary particularly with the type of business model TAHA operates off. 
 
A lightbulb moment for TAHA happened mid-2021 whilst navigating the effect COVID was having on our business. Basically TAHA had lost all trade with the tourism sector and most trade with the hospitality sector. Earlier in the year though I’d signed up for the Government backed Digital Boost programme and if you’re not already aware, Digital Boost is a free one-stop-shop providing the digital expertise you need to future-proof your business. It was through following one of the Digital Boost videos that while scrolling through a Facebook feed, up popped the Ka Hao I Te Ao e-commerce programme
 
The programme was developed by Travis O’Keefe a business disrupter and innovator who has more than 30 years as an entrepreneursocial entrepreneur and business coach, particularly in startup enterprises, business leadership and strategy. As part of developing the Ka Hao programme Travis took the time over a two year period to study the methods 24 eCommerce Gurus use to grow their online sales. 
 
With nothing to lose except time, and everything to gain, I took the plunge and enrolled in the programme which is basically free with a few fun hurdles you need to jump over to be accepted into it. The programme has the support of e-commerce giant Shopify and is based around developing an e-commerce site using the Shopify platform. TAHA had an e-commerce presence on a WIX platform and could have done the Ka Hao programme through transitioning to Shopify but decided for ease of following the programme to set up a completely new platform using Shopify www.tahadrinks.com. For this blog I won't dwell on the content of the Ka Hao programme and what was learnt but you can find out more about it here
 
What the programme did though was immerse you in having an e-commerce platform as a key driver of your business. It’s a driver that would complement the bricks and mortar presence TAHA has through supermarkets  cafesbars and restaurants.
The Ka Hao programme took me from thinking that our business had to be more up to play through having an e-commerce platform, to actually developing and implementing such a platform. To be fair it wasn’t all smooth sailing going through the programme and in fact some parts were very technical and beyond my capabilities and at times even comprehension. It got very technical at times. But I came out of the programme knowing a lot more on how e-commerce needed to be an essential part of our business though I was still needing help to fully optimise what was learnt.
For me even just implementing the basics of what was learnt was challenging. Fortunately just when I was thinking how do I do all this e-commerce stuff, I was invited to go onto the second stage of the programme which is aptly titled 'Done With You’ there’s even another part of the Ka Hao programme called ‘Done for You’. As might be expected though these programmes have a cost and it's completely up to you on whether you want to go to the next stage, there is no pressure at all from the Ka Hao programme. 
 
For the ‘Done with You’ programme you have a number of modules to work through plus have an e-commerce mentor guiding you through the modules and helping you implement them. If you like, for a very reasonable hourly rate you can have someone on call to help you design and implement some of the more technical parts of e-commerce, and believe me there are at least in my mind some very technical aspects. For example, integrating Facebook, Google, Instagram, Tik Tok, email marketing and a myriad of other Apps into your Shopify site.
I’ve learnt though how the TAHA site can be more interactive and responsive to customers such as through live chat and video. There is just so much you can do to attract people to your site and more importantly gain their interest so that they linger on the site which then gives you the opportunity to build connection. You are then able to leverage and measure a range of metrics such AoV (Average order Value), CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), return on ad spend, conversion and abandon rates. As you may have guessed, you are also collecting a lot of customer data which you can interrogate and iterate from. It is the data that will help you optimise and drive your e-commerce platform to position it as a key pillar for your business on increasing sales.
 
The beauty of having a well-functioning e-commerce platform is you can do it from wherever you choose. Whilst for TAHA we are firmly rooted in Aotearoa-New Zealand, we know that by having a solid and adaptable e-commerce platform that you can be running your business from practically anywhere in the world. For example, Portugal has made it more attractive for people to live and work from there through recent introduction of a D7 Digital Nomad Visa
 
We feel we’re only at the beginning of our e-commerce journey and that there is still a lot to learn and put into daily practice. But by cultivating a growth mindset and as alluded to at the beginning of this blog, seeing learning as a lifetime journey, TAHA will keep evolving. 
 
Good news……New TAHA batch was produced Friday 14 October and will be ready for you to order Tuesday 18 October
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