7 Signs you need an eCommerce upgrade
Partner article by Jessica McDonald, Frooition
Poor user experience results in poor sales figures
An online store’s appearance, usability, and features should convey trustworthiness and professionalism. How an eCommerce site looks and behaves speaks to its safety and credibility. The moment your website stops making customers feel good about doing business with you is the moment it is hurting your business.
If your eCommerce site is experiencing any of the following seven signs, it may be time to upgrade:
1. Your Site Is Slow
Customers hate slow loading websites. It has always been this way, but with fast connections now being the norm even on mobile devices, customers are becoming even less patient.
40% of customers will leave a website and not return after waiting three seconds or longer for loading.
If your site is slow, it may be time for a new site or at least some site improvements.
Frooition have written a free guide to improving your site’s load speed which you can download for practical advice on improving your site speed.
2. Your Site Is Hard to Maintain
If changing the home page banner or updating product information on your site requires a developer or is otherwise difficult, you may need a new website.
Ecommerce platforms have many functions, not the least of which is to manage content — whether that content is product information, images, or blog posts. Your business should be able to make rapid changes in a few easy clicks.
4. Your Code Base Is Out of Date
It is the golden age of web development. Almost daily there are new capabilities, new APIs, new frameworks, or new libraries available. It can be hard to keep up. Unfortunately, being behind isn’t just a matter of missing out on features or performance. Out of date code is often vulnerable code.
Ecommerce websites need regular maintenance to ensure safe code is used. If your site has an old code base, you could need a new site.
5. Your Site Is Hard to Navigate
Your online store should be easy to use. A good eCommerce store needs a functional search tool that returns relevant results in a flash. It also needs product categories that customers can use to filter down to the products they want. Layered and faceted navigation is needed to help make it easy to sort through your offerings.
Customers won’t always tell you when your site navigation is bad. They will just leave. If conversion rates or time on site stats are poor, a possible navigation problem should be one of the first you investigate.
Long drop-down menus are a notorious conversion killer. This is obviously a problem for merchants with a wide inventory. A mega menu is the solution to this issue. A type of expandable menu in which many choices are displayed in a two-dimensional layout. Navigation is structured through typography and everything is visible at once, eliminating the need for scrolling.
Good eCommerce site navigation, like the header menu in this Frooition BigCommerce design for wildaboutcarts.com, should be easy to understand and easy to use.
6. Your Site Is Difficult to Expand
It should be easy to integrate your eCommerce platform with third-party services. Want to start using a great new order processing software suite? You should be able to tie into it via an application programming interface (API). If your site or platform can’t, you are at a competitive disadvantage.
If your goal is to increase turnover and profits, then your website must be easy to extend and integrate. If it is not, you might need a new site.
7. You’ve Just Hit £1 Million in Sales
The eCommerce platform that got you your first £1 million in online sales may not be the best choice to get you to £10 million.
Online shops with annual sales below £1 million are grouped as small eCommerce retailers, and often face significantly different challenges to larger online sellers. Because of this, it only makes sense that you might need a different eCommerce platform to make that jump from small to medium eCommerce.
Look for a solution that helps you automate processes
When your business had ten orders a day, as an example, it was simple to look out for fraud. When you have 1,000 orders per day, fraud prevention may need to be integrated into your site; When your business grows, your site must evolve too.
About Frooition
Frooition is a specialist eCommerce design agency.
Our in-house design, development and support teams have over ten years’ experience in creating and maintaining successful sales focused website design.
