10 Tips and 10 Actions for your January 2017 eCommerce Renovation Plan

Is January the best month for taking a vacation or starting an eCommerce renovation?

December will soon seem like be a dream or a nightmare depending on how well your store was ready for the busiest month of the year. In contrast, when January, one of the slowest month (1) is here, taking a vacation seems like a good option.

While you deserve a holiday break after Christmas retail craze, you may need to wait for few weeks. The month of January is the beginning of a new retail calendar cycle and should be considered as the “e-commerce renovation month.”

eCommerce renovation – Step 1: Analytics

Experienced eCommerce managers know that applying analytics to inspect and fix the sales conversion rate issues is the fist step in the online store upgrades and improvements process.

The analysis of the data from the previous year provides you with insights that are necessary to create a detailed plan of actions how to enhance your store, increase conversion, and grow your sales revenue and profit.
The conversion rate trend is the common concern of eCommerce executive and managers. The fact that conversion rates are at all times low on all devices at the end of 2016 (2) requires even more attention to the issues that may impact the conversion negatively.

Last month we talked about how important is the shopping cart page for sales conversion, but there is a lot more that could be done. What other pages and processes should we inspect?

10 Tips for your analytics review

1. Analyze the homepage performance to see how well the page is performing for those people who land directly on it.
2. Look for the top bounce pages – those are the pages that people are landed on and immediately left without visiting any other pages on the site.
3. Review the high exit rate pages – those are the pages that the visitors left the site from but not necessarily landed on them.
4. Check the pages that have with the shortest time spent on the site – which pages visitors do not stay on for a long time.
5. Analyze where the majority of the traffic that has high abandonment comes from: organic searches, paid campaigns or social channels.
6. Examine your highest traffic pages to see which products drive traffic to your site.
7. Study on-site search queries to learn what people are searching for.
8. Review the new email subscribers list growth.
9. Analyze the repeat shoppers data to see if you have repeat purchasers who come back and shop from your store.
10. Examine your promotions you ran through the year to check which ones worked and which ones did not.

10 Actions for your eCommerce renovation plan

1. Create an a/b version of the product page with only a few changes at a time and see if the conversion rate improves. You can also try the same approach on a few other pages such Home, Search and Checkout Process. The changes could be as simple as copy changes.
2. Improve product description, the more information you can add the better chances you have at conversion.
3. Add more product photos or update the existing images.
4.  Make sure that the return policy is readily available through the site.
5. Optimize the traffic sources to right pages. Make sure your social and paid links are driving traffic to the relevant pages.
6. Confirm that on-site product catalog search returns expected products, for example, the search phrase “red cup” does not just return all red items from your store inventory. At least allow shoppers to use filters to narrow the search results.
7. Design promo areas to be clearly visible even on mobile.
8. Review your Newsletter Sign Pop Up Blocker – and if necessary add supplementary information on the advantages of being a subscriber of your community.
9. Update Homepage banners to be more in tune with the new year`s trends.
10. Create regular personalized emails and incentives to drive people who already purchased from you back to the store.

After you have a clear and detailed action list for your store improvements and have assigned the right people to the tasks, perhaps February could be your vacation month (2nd slowest retail month).