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quick steps to a high performing ecommerce site


By Ian Hammersley, Smartebusiness.co.uk


Success in ecommerce is a hard fought battle, taking time, resources, and energy, and that’s before you even start making traction. Te hardest part of running an ecommerce site is the daily balancing act, as your team manages inventory, marketing, sales, customer service, returns and even IT security. With all this going on how can you make improvements?


Luckily, there are 10 easy steps you can take to drive an instant increase in your ecommerce sites performance, without taking hours out of each day. Ready to get started?


1 2


Build a strong foundation in the right areas


Successful ecommerce sites need an effective structure. Don’t waste hours tweaking minor aspects of frontend


design and forget your fundamental sales processes. You want a smooth customer experience, because you mapped out how shipping, pricing, returns, customer service and product listings are to be handled. Now to test it. Go out right now and get feedback on your store from 5 people and if you don’t know 5 people use a service such a ‘WhatUsersDo’. Sometimes you’ll find blindingly obvious issues that you cannot see because you are too close to your business.


Create a compelling value proposition


Customers purchase products they perceive a value in. What makes your product worth buying? If you’re stuck, head


to Google and search for your product. Look at your competitors sponsored listings, and run the URL’s of their sites through tools like SpyFu (http://www. spyfu.com/) and SEM Rush (http://www. semrush.com/) to get estimates of their online advertising spend. You’re looking for competitors spending big, because this means they’re seeing success via


Direct Commerce | www.directcommercemagazine.com


adwords for new customer acquisition. Now head to their site, and look at how they’re promoting the products. Te features they’re advertising usually align to what customers actually want. Take this inspiration and work out how you can build your own value proposition, fitting what your customers are really after.


3 4


Research your own customer acquisition levels


Bringing in new customers is a lifeline for your eCommerce site. Customer acquisitions are an integral figure to


track, but not just at the highest level. You need to be able to determine which marketing channels give the best return on your advertising spend, so you can focus your efforts on making the biggest impact. Perhaps advertising on Facebook drives more traffic to your site, but it’s your presence on Pinterest which is resulting in the highest number of new customers. Look at your sales data right now, and find the channel generating the lion’s share of your business. Tis is where your time and marketing efforts need to be focused.


Never let go of existing customers


Getting a new customer costs five times more than it does to keep one, so brainstorm how to turn


initial purchases into recurring sales. Get customer feedback, set up Google Alerts to be notified when new reviews go online, be active on social media and actually talk to your customers. Once you know why customers bought initially, you can leverage it to provide a comprehensive shopping experience. Perhaps there are add-ons or an updated version you can offer, or bundle a subscription package together to secure repeat business. Te best ecommerce companies get 76% of revenue from repeat business; your site needs to be working towards the same ratio.


5 Reviving lost customers


Churn rate is another metric crucial to high performance, measuring customers who stop buying from you. As you already


have their purchase history, emails and information, put together a marketing offer with promotional pricing customized to every lost customer. Send it out now. For future, consider sending discount cards for customer birthdays, or award them some ‘reward’ points that expire soon as a way to get them back to the site. Segment these ‘lost customers’ into their own email segment and survey them – who are they, why did they stop buying, who are they buying from now – use this information to see if you can reduce the churn rate.


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