eCommerce guide – Part 5: Website maintenance
Website maintenance is essential to keep things running smoothly on your ecommerce site. Once your site is launched, traffic is building and you’ve been monitoring your analytics data you may want to make some changes to improve sales. You can handle content changes and your web company will probably be able to help with the technical side of things as required.
Content Updates
As described in the marketing chapter, regular news/blog updates are a great way to increase traffic to your site. Changing banners, refreshing text content, updating prices and adding/removing products will all be part of your weekly routine.
Asking For Feedback
You can use a third party service (list here on Quora) to collect feedback from customers on your website, or ask customers to fill in a short Typeform survey about their shopping experience. Any common themes can inform what you can change to improve the customer experience.
Asking For Reviews
Genuine reviews are an excellent way to build trust and increase sales. If possible, set up an automatic reminder that asks people to review their purchases. If not, you can ask customers manually to leave a review. Hiding the review count if you don’t actually have any reviews is a good idea!
Usability Tweaks
Based on feedback from visitors and customers you may discover issues with the usability of your website, or parts of your website. If you keep getting asked the same questions that could be a sign there may be a usability issue. A high bounce rate or high cart abandonment may also mean the same.
Software Updates
Whichever self-hosted software system you choose, it will need to be kept up to date to avoid security issues. Your website getting hacked and displaying unsavoury adverts or delivering malware to visitors could undo all the hard work you’ve done building trust and climbing the search engine rankings.
To make this process less disruptive, you can ask your web designer/developer to create a development version of the website again so you can test the updates all work together. This development site can be hidden from Google and customers so only you have access. Once you’re happy everything is working as it should, the live site can be updated.
Reducing Cart Abandonment
Your marketing is going well and you’re attracting new potential customers, they like your site and can find what they want to buy – things are looking good. However you might notice many people abandon their shopping carts during checkout. Here are some of the reasons this might happen:
- Checkout Is Confusing Or Too Long
- Forcing Customers To Sign Up
- Hidden Postage Costs
- Checkout Doesn’t Look Trustworthy
- Following up on abandoned carts
Want to read more?
This is an excerpt from our ebook Ecommerce Enlightenment, available now in our online shop.