Change happens more quickly in the online marketplace than it does anywhere else. Since communications happen almost instantaneously, trends are picked up and dropped very quickly. Businesses that take a flexible approach to problem solving are the ones that succeed in the long run.
In addition, competition is high in eCommerce. Sometimes differentiation requires a reevaluation of your game plan and a search for ways to improve your processes and strategy to help your business continue to flourish. Take heed of some of the suggestions the experts at our eCommerce agency offer you.
Evaluate (or Re-evaluate) Your Supply Chain
If your eCommerce business develops and manufactures its own wares, then that’s good for you, but others are not so fortunate. Disruptions in supply chains have had serious consequences for online businesses and shoppers that rely on them.
Keep communication open with your suppliers. Find out about their disaster plans with particular respect to two scenarios. Find out how the business is equipped to survive a reduction in orders, but most important find out how they are equipped to manage an increase.
If your suppliers can’t cope with increased demand and you can’t fill orders, customer satisfaction will drop. If possible, now might be the time to diversify your portfolio of suppliers to protect your business.
Another note: If you’re having trouble meeting demands or shipping has been delayed, split your procurement schedule as a buffer against spikes in orders. That way, instead of getting one bulk shipment and a bunch of customers that might be unhappy with a delay, you can get two or more shipments on a rolling basis to help cope with the demand.
Make Customer Satisfaction a Priority
One of the greatest benefits of eCommerce is that it enables you to reach the widest market in the world. The downside is that customers have as much access to you (and your competitors) as you have to them. They can shop between competitors’ offerings in the blink of an eye.
Communicate with your customers about what matters to them. Elicit their feedback in an order confirmation email. Ask them to take a survey and offer them a perk that your business is capable of offering. You want to know what matters most to your customers and the answer isn’t always price.
Perhaps your target market relishes swift communication. Perhaps your target audience is highly receptive to offers of specials or sales. Maybe the case is even that your customers have been waiting for you to offer customizable or personalized products. You’ll never know unless you ask.
Consider Repositioning
Consumer habits have changed, and that is because they have experienced a change in lifestyle. For example, some fashion eCommerce companies have struggled and even gone out of business pursuant to the caveat of the old dictum that some are “all dressed up and have nowhere to go.” People learn quickly – they won’t be getting dressed up if they have nowhere to go for long.
Because customers’ fundamental needs have shifted, if your business is experiencing a slump in conversion rates or sales but is still capable of conducting business, you may want to consider repositioning your online marketing, even a full rebrand.
Instead of marketing your product as a way to decorate yourself for high society, position it as a product in which the customer can indulge from the comfort of home. Stress the importance of self-care instead of social gathering. There are a million ways to go with it – now is the time to get creative, or to work with our digital agency’s creative team for branding.
Refresh Your Category or Product Pages
Something as simple as fresh product images or a new description can really catch a user’s attention. In fact, it’s more likely to capture the attention of repeat users, and their business is as important, if not more important, than new prospects. Since they are more familiar with your site, oftentimes a new description or some fresh content will really get their attention. After all, your customers look to you as the authority on your own products.
Even a quick change like some new, high-quality product images can have a profound effect on consumer behavior. It can have a refreshing effect on the overall spirit of your website and, on top of that, it can generate reinvigorated interest in your products.
You might even want to take this opportunity to perform an entire site refresh or holistic website redesign. Conduct a customer satisfaction survey, and you may found that they are desirous of new elements on your website.
As you can see, there is more than one way to switch things up and create new flavor for and attraction to your eCommerce website. These are only a few of the more immediate, easier ways to spice up your online presence, but you could certainly get more involved with a new website development project or even a migration to a newer, more capable eCommerce platform.
Our full-service eCommerce agency has served eCommerce clients in many different industries throughout the years, solving problems ranging from stale content to slouching sales and shoddy website designs. If you’re experiencing challenges in the online marketplace and need some help adapting, reach out to our team at info@1digitalagency.com or by phone at 888-696-4059 and let us help you reinvigorate your online business.
Build Adaptability Into Operations, Not Just Strategy
The advice above — diversify suppliers, prioritize customer satisfaction, reposition, and refresh pages — is sound, but it only sticks if it is wired into how the business runs week to week rather than treated as an annual exercise. A few concrete practices turn “be adaptable” into a repeatable system:
- Maintain a second qualified supplier for every A-class SKU. Identify the 20% of products that drive roughly 80% of revenue and ensure each has an alternate, pre-vetted source with agreed pricing — before you need it. The cost of a slightly higher unit price from a backup is trivial against the cost of a stockout on a bestseller during a demand spike.
- Run a standing post-purchase survey. Rather than a one-off survey, embed a single question in the order-confirmation flow and rotate it quarterly (delivery speed, packaging, product fit, what nearly stopped you buying). A continuous trickle of structured feedback surfaces a shift in customer priorities months before it shows up in the conversion rate.
- Schedule category-page refresh cycles. Put your top category and landing pages on a calendar — new hero imagery, refreshed copy, updated internal links every quarter. Search engines reward content that is maintained, and repeat customers notice staleness faster than new visitors do.
Use Data to Decide When to Reposition vs. Redesign
“Consider repositioning” is good advice that fails without a trigger. Use a simple decision rule based on data you already have in analytics:
- If traffic is steady but conversion rate is falling, the problem is usually message–market fit — reposition the offer, the value proposition, and the on-page copy before touching the design.
- If conversion rate is steady but traffic is falling, the problem is acquisition — invest in SEO and content, not a rebrand.
- If bounce rate and exit rate spike on mobile specifically, the problem is experience — a targeted redesign of the affected templates will return more than a full rebrand.
This keeps spend proportional to the actual problem instead of defaulting to the most expensive intervention.
A Lightweight Quarterly Adaptation Review
Tie it together with a recurring 90-minute review every quarter: pull conversion rate, AOV, traffic by channel, and the quarter’s survey theme; identify the single biggest negative movement; and commit to one change with a measurable target before the next review. Adaptability is not a personality trait of successful merchants — it is a cadence. Businesses that institutionalize the review out-survive competitors who only react when sales are already in free fall.
When a quarterly review surfaces a problem bigger than copy and imagery — a platform that can no longer support the catalog, or a brand that no longer matches the market — our team handles the larger interventions too, from website redesign and rebranding to a full platform migration.