eCommerce Spring Cleaning Tips: Optimize Your Store for Conversions
Thursday, March 19, 2020Eric Zegarski
eCommerce Spring Cleaning Tips: No One Likes a Dirty Website!
Scheduling regular maintenance for your eCommerce store ensures that it’s always running in tiptop shape. Your online business is always in flux. You’re always adding new products, launching marketing campaigns, or adding new features to your website. Sometimes, these activities can make your eCommerce store a little dirty. Whether you’re running your shop on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento, these simple action items can be executed anytime. Best of all, you’ll never run out of Lemon Pledge.
Audit Product Information
Seasonal product variants, updates to product descriptions, or new product images are a few updates that occur on an ongoing basis. Thus, scour your products and remove any discontinued products or seasonal product images. Also, revise your product descriptions to ensure that they're current as product features and/or materials change. Be sure to check that all links in your product pages are working as well. We recommend you double check your pricing as well.
Test Your Website for Broken Links and Contact Forms
If you’re constantly updating your site, then you need to do a link audit beyond your product pages. It’s essential that all links work from an UX and SEO perspective. The last thing you want is customers who have their credit card in hand and ready to buy ending up on a 404 page. Contact forms play a key part in your customer service. They allow prospective and existing customers to reach out with questions about your products and services. Testing these forms ensures that inquiries are delivered to your team. You should run tests to see that not only are your forms being received, but that the appropriate departments are receiving them. Remember, you can showcase your great customer service even before someone becomes a customer.
Audit Your Website’s Load Speed
In the words of Ricky Bobby, "If you’re not first, you’re last". A fast website not only improves your UX but also impacts your SEO. With a mobile first approach, it’s essential to have a fast website. Users will not always have access to a reliable wi-fi network. What was once considered to be fast, is now considered to be poor when it comes to load times. A 3 second load time is now considered to be poor. A fast website loads anywhere between 0.4 to under 2 seconds. If you’re looking for a place to start, ensure that all your image files are compressed. A great resource for downsizing image file sizes is tinypng.com.
Evaluate Your Cart Value Optimization Tactics
Ecommerce 101 teaches us that offering upsell products during the checkout process increases your average cart value. Most merchants have a “goes great with” or “also bought with” section for each product. Admit it, you’ve fallen for this tactic once or twice! Auditing these products recommendations also gives you valuable insights into your marketing tactics. You have an opportunity to identify which offers deliver the most upsell conversions as well as remove any seasonal upsells you might still be offering. For example, a surcharge for 5-dollar Christmas gift wrapping might not be a great upsell in February.
Eliminate Your Manual Data Entry
Time for our shameless plug! Eliminating manual data entry not only allows you to be more productive by focusing on what matters, but it also keeps your data clean. Our integration solution eliminates the need for manual data entry. You’ll have organizational wide transparency, be able plan reorder points accurately, and fulfill your orders faster. An eBridge integration solution is universal, meaning we have pre-built connectors for Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce and other leading eCommerce providers. If you're looking to diversify your multi-channel strategy, we also have pre-built connectors for Amazon, Walmart marketplace, and support 100s of retail EDI trading partners.