3 ways to keep improving your eCommerce store

Improvement is an ongoing task, this is true for those running an eCommerce website. Trends, what’s popular, these all change. We’re going to look at how to keep improving your eCommerce website.

We will look and tell you how best to do this on a Magento website, but these tips can be used across all types of eCommerce websites.

But before we get into the suggestions, you will want to make sure….

Make sure you’ve got tracking set up

First things first, to be able to measure and understand how your website is performing. What you will want is to understand:

• Where your traffic is coming from
• How people interact with your website
• The customer journey from start to sale

You may find that there isn’t a single tool that gives you all of the above, meaning you need multiple tools, e.g. Google Analytics to review traffic, Hotjar to get heatmaps etc.

In Magneto, it’s fairly easy to set up and add tracking codes to the website.

Now, onto the ideas.

1. Review your abandoned cart

There is nothing worse for an eCommerce store owner than to see incomplete shopping carts. Having a potential order get so close to finalising checkout than to see it so close, yet so far. Well, this isn’t that uncommon, in a study from March 2020, the average abandoned cart rate was almost 90% across all industries.

So, it is worth checking these on a semi-regular basis (such as once a month). From this, you can find try to understand what might be causing these abandoned carts, a particular product or range, put off by the delivery cost, issue during checkout etc.

Whatever, the reason might be, knowing can help you test and make improvements on the process.

There is a report in the Magento admin area you can see abandoned carts. This can make it simpler to see a particular issue that needs looking at.

2. Personalized product recommendations

Research suggests that 84% of consumers will look at product recommendations at least some of the time.

A great example of product recommendations is Amazon. On the atypical product page, you can ‘people also bought’ products, an up-sell to get you to add more to the cart.

The other a comparison to similar products, another up-sell letting you see the price difference between what the customer is looking and the next version up.

Applying this to your own catalogue though can be a time-consuming task, especially if you have an extensive product library.

What you can do to start this off, is look at your top-selling products. From here, if you are not sure what products go with, start with your best selling, and work through 10 a week. There is a simple report to see what the best selling products are in Magento.

When applying the up and cross-sells, having the data from other orders to be able to add those as recommended is the ideal. Otherwise, use your best judgement, doing 10 a week should give you enough time to add relevant product recommendations to them.

3. Improve your on-site search

Your on-site search is an important part of how customers find your products. The likelihood is that the majority of visits to your website, result in someone using the search functionality to narrow down their search.

Making sure that searches return the most relevant results. In Magento there is a simple way fo you to review and edit the search results from the admin area. You can use it to review the highest searched terms, the number of results and direct them to specific pages.

Continually analyze what works

As with all of these points, these can’t be worked on for a day/week and be done. Rome wasn’t built in a day, it’s going to take time and continuous work to keep improving your website.

Trends will change, new product lines will be added, and so on, the key is to keep working to at it to help make your store relevant and easy to sue for your customers.