The online market continues thriving as more people buy products online. If you operate an ecommerce business and haven’t optimized your website, you will lose out on growth opportunities. According to eMarketer research, global eCommerce is projected to rise 20.7% in 2019.
Another report says 2019 e-retail sales will account for 14.1 percent of all retail sales worldwide. These numbers highlight the potential available on the online platform. However, you can only harness these opportunities if your online store is up-to-date.
This guide highlights warning signs that your eCommerce store needs an upgrade and different techniques you should consider for the project.
Is it time to upgrade your Ecommerce Store?
As an online business owner, it is important to review the performance of your eCommerce website constantly.
There are innovative online tools to track different site metrics. Using data collected, you can tweak your site to boost performance.
Some of the signs that your online store needs an upgrade include:
- Heavy traffic and poor conversion
- High bounce rates
- Poor page loading speeds
- Lack of or dated call-to-actions (CTAs)
- Problems publishing and editing content
- Not mobile-friendly
- Site reporting problems
- Integration issues
- Old content
- Poor social media linkage
If you have noticed any of these issues, it is time for an upgrade for your eCommerce website. Such an upgrade not only boosts sales but also improves your SEO efforts. It also delivers a better user experience which in turn leads to customer loyalty.
Ideas for Your Ecommerce Site Upgrade
Consider the following factors for your eCommerce store update:
- Boost your Site’s Speeds
Most business owners focus on aesthetics for their eCommerce websites and forget about the load speed. For every second of waiting time, your store loses customers, and this leads to high bounce rates and poor conversions.
If a website takes more than three seconds to load, more than half of your visitors will leave. For this reason, you have to boost site load speeds by first testing every page’s load speed and identifying the problem areas.
Consider reducing page size, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), compress data, use caching and in-memory technology, optimize your site’s platform configuration and combining multiple files for fewer “round trips.”
- Optimize the Checkout Process
If you have noticed high cart abandonment rate or poor conversions, there might be a problem with your checkout process. This is where many eCommerce stores lose out on business because of complex payment processes.
Almost 27% of customers say they abandon their carts due to lengthy and inefficient checkout processes. With this in mind, you need to carry out tests to determine the efficiency of your store’s checkout process.
Other things to consider include tracking abandoned orders and conversions, make error validation user-friendly, avoid time wastage, provide product or service customization and keep the back button fully functional.
You should also display trust signals throughout the checkout process, real-time support (live chat), free shipping offers, incentivize the purchase and provide multiple payment options. All these upgrades improve the checkout process and reduce cart abandonment.
- Leverage Product Description
Product descriptions are among the most crucial albeit overlooked components of eCommerce. Many store owners invest heavily in web design and aesthetics but ignore the product details. They copy the manufacturers’ descriptions which can lead to devastating Google penalties due to duplicate content. Such descriptions also don’t convert.
The best product descriptions help your store’s SEO efforts, lure the customers and help in the purchase journey. They provide a great user experience for your customers which builds lasting relationships.
You should focus on the product benefits, show the value proposition, tell the full story about the product, use keywords for SEO purposes and invest in high-quality images. You can hire a product descriptions service to come up with content that converts.
- Improve Visibility for Search
If your customers cannot find your eCommerce store on search engine result pages (SERPs), there’s no chance of selling. As such, you have to increase your store’s visibility on search.
Some of the SEO strategies to use include technical site audit to ensure the structure is usable, keyword research, long-tail keywords, long content, link audit, fresh content for your blog, among other tactics. The idea is to make your website friendlier for search engines.
- Optimize the Ecommerce Store for Mobile
More customers now come to your online store on mobile. For this reason, you have to optimize your website for mobile traffic.
Some of the upgrades to use include clear layout and simple website navigation, bold CTAs which are easy to read, fast loading pages and providing an omnichannel user-experience.
You should also avoid flash and unwarranted pop-ups, create a mobile app and leveraging responsive web design.
Final Thoughts
An update to your eCommerce website is overdue if you haven’t met your desired conversion rates. High bounce rates, poor loading speeds, and failure to target mobile users are other reasons to upgrade your eCommerce platform. With these tips, you can now spruce up your online store and boost its performance on search. The upgrade will also help meet other business objectives you have in mind.
