Last month when we were visiting a few clients in NY, I had the opportunity to attend this Magento Community Meetup. Some of the thoughts that were shared by some of the fellow community developers were wonderful. One of the key discussions focused on some of the important areas which would kill an eCommerce website.
1. Ignoring Site Loading Speed
Majority of failures in eCommerce portals is due to the site loading speed. Each second in the load time matters. A key statistic mentions that 1 second in a delay will lead to a 7% drop in conversion rates. This is a very important aspect that retailers should be aware of even before launching their eCommerce business. For example, if a store can sell approximately $1,000 worth of products per day, that simple one second delay can cause losses of $25,500 per year.
2. Desktop Focus
In the current days of M-commerce, if the website is not optimized for mobile, then the retailer was losing up to 50% of the average traffic to the website. Before purchasing a product, customers do a lot of research in their mobiles. An unresponsive website will lose these potential customers. This problem can be tackled in two different ways:
a) Responsive Design – A design which adapts to all the devices automatically thereby providing a glitch free experience.
b) Individual Theme – By creating different layouts for each device, which has both pros and cons as you can display only the required information in the device. We can hide less priority information for small screen devices.
3. Difficult Checkout Process
The key step for increasing sales is to monitor the checkout process page regularly by doing proper analytics of abandoned cart. Generally users leave the checkout page if the process is complicated.
Below are the key reasons for a checkout page to not convert into sales,
- Too many steps in checkout process
- Forcing account creation
- No smart fields
- Every new field drops conversion rates
- Having fields without Inline Validation. Using validation and showing error on each field before submission of the form will increase trust on the website.
4. Not watching the metrics
A successful eCommerce business depends on careful monitoring and analysis of the metrics. Below are the few key metrics we should always look out for:
- Retention rates
- Sales Benchmarking
- Average order values (small, medium and large)
- Purchase frequency of the product.
5. Highly Dependent on Marketing
Most of the merchants rely on the marketing like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. However attracting new customer costs 5X the cost of sales. A study shows that 60%-70% of the sales are often from existing customers. So you should be very careful in retaining existing customers. 71% of consumers end the relationship because of the poor customer service. Don’t rely more on marketing. It will be great if you can follow below steps to keep your customers happy:
- Personalized offers after purchase
- Sales support that makes bonding stronger
- Fast delivery
- Easy password retrieval
- Easy repeat purchase
- Free returns
I had a great time attending this Meetup and some of the knowledge that we shared across this meetup is something which I would take back and implement in our upcoming assignments.
