Although it’s not exclusive to the ecommerce business model, the first few months are all about passing the viability exam. Do whatever it takes to get the engine running – you can worry about the color of the spolier if and when it picks up some speed. You’re learning how to manage all of your costs and when to pay whom how much for what. And while the objective for phase I is survival – the establishment of a viable business – the goal of the next stage is to feed the beast [the optimal diet]. Phase II presents its own challenges in the sheer diversity of ways you can invest in your webstore, trying to figure out where to put money and how much to allocate. If you’re on a platform like Shopify, Bigcommerce or Volusion, just a quick glance at the 3rd party app marketplace shows you how deep the waters are for customizing and improving your website. So, as someone who spends their day improving ecommerce businesses, I feel that I owe it to our readers to offer my best ecommerce improvement tips.
Phase I
When a new ecommerce website is being created, the owner almost always has a budget that limits the scope. Stripped down to the essentials, the typical phase I scope of work reads: custom logo, custom home, category and product pages, responsive to mobile and tablet-sized screens, inventory data uploaded, shipping and payment gateway setup, and figure out the best platform to build/host it on. Including marketing costs, you should expect expenses to break five figures within the first few months.
That amount of money isn’t peanuts to a lot of online retailers just getting into the business, which means a lean launch and a second phase “wishlist” that will have to wait until later.
For a lot of struggling merchants trying to sell in a market that’s far too saturated for their generic inventories and $300/mo gimmick marketing campaigns, later never comes. Lucky for you, if you’ve gotten this far into an article about second phase improvements for ecommerce websites, chances are you’re a merchant that launched recently (between 4 – 12 months ago), you’ve survived the first phase and are doing well enough to reinvest in a second. If that’s you, kudos, congrats and well done – ecommerce is not easy when you’re starting out.
So what’s out there? What’s new? What’s effective? What’s a secret weapon that no one else ever heard of, that’ll launch me to the top? Do I need to add more features and design better graphics, or should I put all my weight into Adwords, SEO, Facebook ads… Tell me 1Digital!
Phase II
Okay, okay! Naturally I have to preface any ecommerce improvement tips given through the blog with the caveat that no article is going to be as useful as a phone call with a real person who will listen and give you honest, actionable advice (just make sure that real person is a real ecommerce genius!). That said, here are several must-have features that would make for a turbocharged phase II scope of work.
Popups
Popups are no longer the bounce inducing nuisance they were 5 – 10 years ago. Today’s popups are smart and know how to get out of the way long before the user is annoyed. There are also many different functions a popup can serve – from the most basic informational window to a multi-step wizard that records a complex configuration. But even a simple graphic/text popup can improve the user experience if used in a way that saves page-loading time and opens in an interesting way, even if the functionality starts and ends with a close button.
Another time-saving popup is the Soft Add-to-Cart, but this one also boosts sales revenue by increasing the average order size. The soft add-to-cart lets users add an item to their cart without being ushered to the cart page – away from the category they were just shopping in. Imagine if you were shopping at a department store and found yourself standing in front of the register every time you placed a shirt or a pair of socks in the cart – forced to navigate back to the underwear aisle for your next item. The soft add-to-cart is such a beneficial feature, it makes you wonder why it isn’t default platform functionality.
Other common popups that add value are newsletter signup, product details quick view, and third party extensions like live chat and social media product sharing. Usually, email newsletter signup popups are either shown to customers when they first enter the site or when their mouse cursor moves outside the browser window. Incentives are typical, and often come in the form of a one-time discount. Once a customer has signed up or declined to do so, they are not shown the popup again. The quick view lets shoppers see product details without leaving the category page, useful for browsing several products without being interrupted by page loading delays.
Hover effects
This relatively inexpensive addition of value is a personal favorite of mine when it comes to phase II development. There are probably cooler and better effects invented every day, and they’re a lot of fun to browse through. They can improve the user experience by adding another dimension to your menu buttons, graphics, icons, and product images – creating an entertaining, interactive environment that increases average session time and possibly your average order size. Hover effects should be considered a design decision, since they’re more aesthetic than functional, and great care should be used for selection and placement of these effects – too many effects can make a site look tacky and superficial.
If you clicked on any of the links in the previous paragraph but never clicked on one of the “previous demo” links you’ll find in the top left corner of the page, it’s probably the reason you’re still reading this. The demos at Tympanus.net go far beyond hover effects and show some pretty complex functionality. Each one has the potential to become a pretty serious phase II improvement, so I’m obligated to warn you (if it’s not already too late) that browsing these demos has a pretty powerful “rabbit hole” effect that can eat up an hour or two before you know it.
Graphic design
If you hired a professional who did a good job designing your website, you shouldn’t redesign it. Even if they did a decent or an okay job, you don’t need to spend money on a website redesign at this point. Do it only if you’re still using a cheap/free template or you somehow got royally ripped-off on a custom disaster, because there is a minimum standard of ecommerce website design that you need to maintain.
That said, there are things you should be doing in the Photoshop department to build the brand. If you have a slider on the homepage, you should design all new banners for it. Pay attention to the copy in these sliders – these are the words that shape your brand, so spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re going to write here. Whatever your write will define your image, so if your writing is bland, so is your brand, and bland does not attract repeat business. Or one-time business, really.
Invest in a product photographer to take really great high-res pictures of your most photogenic products to keep on hand for promotions and graphics. Super important.
But all of the ecommerce improvement tips above concern only your website. Marketing is a non-negotiable expense that you should never approach with a frugal mindset. In ecommerce, word of mouth is something that you should never rely on to contribute increases in traffic. You gotta pay to play, and choosing the right agency to manage your Adwords account and SEO campaign plays a huge part in your potential to succeed online. But in-depth marketing advice is for another post, another time. Hopefully you have a pretty good idea what the next steps for your ecommerce business are, and you’re excited to take them.