Shift your eCommerce focus Back to Basics

The world of eCommerce is forever changing, updating and growing with new ideas, required integrations and features.

If your current eCommerce website isn’t easily interchangeable to fit the needs of your customer’s demands, you could be running the risk of falling short and losing your hard-earned customer base.

eCommerce is only going to grow to be bigger and better year after year, and you can guarantee it isn’t leaving the scene anytime soon as it will continue to be a larger portion of your business.

This is your ultimate guide towards beginning a seamless journey for you and your customers as eCommerce continues to grow.

Buyers benefit from eCommerce through

  • Easier and quicker transactions
  • More informed purchasing decisions
  • Easier product comparisons

Sellers benefit from eCommerce through

  • The ability to sell their product 24/7
  • Greater visibility for potential customers who
    may otherwise not know about a company
  • More control over costs and inventory

Click on a Topic to Learn More

Scalability

A scalable website architecture enables your site to have the opportunity to scale seamlessly regardless of the amount of traffic or order volume on your site.

By carefully leveraging your eCommerce platform’s APIs to ensure high website speed and scalability along with a catered integration approach, you can create a more scalable and efficient website. Not all integration approaches are created equally and need to be separately considered when architecting your website for the best possible customer experience.

As your website grows it is going to be important that it is also scalable. A scalable website is available to your customers no matter what time of day it is and how many people are on at the same time. It gives the same performance that it would no matter who is using it, and it is easily maintainable on the back end so that your team members can quickly manage and update whenever they are needed.

Make your site ScalableLiving Spaces Scales New Site
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middleware provider
stable eCommerce site
added server resources
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payment processor
PIM system
Order Management
System
eCommerce platform

Flexibility

It is critical to create a flexible technology foundation through extending your eCommerce platform to avoid breaking its upgrade path.

Decoupling your integrations allows for flexibility as your business grows and evolves. When you work with an older solution, it is more than likely that your integrations are tightly coupled together leaving no room to update and add in new features. Having a more modern integration approach comes with the benefits of decoupling your systems. This gives the flexibility to add or remove systems without the stress of having to completely redo your entire website every time there is an update.

As the digital commerce space is forever evolving, keeping the backend of your website flexible enough to maintain and update without having to completely redo your code is key in staying up to date with what your customer needs and expectations. Decoupling your systems to make the entire process a lot cleaner and streamlined can make all the difference as you maintain your web solution.

Make your site FlexibleCrescent's Flexible Technology Foundation

Speed

According to HubSpot, 79% of paying customers will consider shopping elsewhere if your website’s product and checkout pages can’t keep pace.

A one-second delay in site load times reduces user satisfaction by 15% or more. Essentially, the faster your website works for your customers, the better. You can see lower bounce rates and happier shoppers with just a few tweaks to your website to ensure your website is performant. Your web platform can play a huge role in how quickly your website loads, along with optimizing your website for SEO purposes. The better your SEO score, the more likely your website speeds are also staying up with modern standards.

The speed of your website can make or break whether or not someone actually makes it all the way through the checkout process. If page load times are taking just slightly too long for someone’s liking, they will more than likely head to a different website that can get them what they need in a fraction of the time. Your web platformcan play a huge role in how quickly your website loads, along with your SEO.

Make your site FastDistributor Increases Site Speed
Notepad showing drawing showing the benefits of a fast site
fast site
more sales
slow site
bad experience
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Reliability

By automating your manual processes and integrations to reduce costs, errors, and risks, you can set up a website that is reliable without the stress of a team member having to physically go in and do the work themselves.

You want to ensure that your website isn’t going to fail you when you set it up to automate specific tasks. Users who are using your website also want to ensure the reliability of your website that it’s going to perform the way it is intended to. The platform that you decide to utilize will be a key factor in the reliability of your website. Another aspect to the stability of your website is to ensure you have the proper back-end infrastructure in place to meet your web traffic and order volume. This ties into the scalability of your site and helps to enhance the security of your website’s data.  

Trust is built with customers throughout their entire experience on the website. Shoppers want someone they can rely on to get them what they are shopping for. Things such as utilizing automatic retry mechanisms that are put in place in case of errors so that the system will auto-correct itself instead of an intervention by an admin can really go a long way in keeping your site reliable and thus in your customers experience.

Make your site ReliableCleaner's Reliable Digital Transformation

Efficiency

Once you have your new eCommerce platform fully set up, it is important to then leverage the new platform’s tools to engage with your customers efficiently.

You can learn from their actual behavior and allow your team to adapt to their ever-changing needs through training your team to use the platform as soon as possible in the actual build portion of the project. When your integrations are set up correctly, everything should work together smoothly and efficiently so that your website can run better than ever before.

Leveraging your tools after an implementation can be all the difference between changing your past issues and not creating new ones. When your website is set up correctly, you will be given new tools that team members may not know how to use just yet, so learning how to use them and what to do with them is what will help your business be more successful in the long run.

Make your site EfficientFjallraven's Efficient eCommerce Site
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promotional tests
A/B conversion testing
platform analytics tools

Shift your eCommerce Focus Back to Basics