6 signs that it’s time to optimize your e-commerce site

With the ever-increasing popularity of e-commerce, it is essential to have a complete and efficient e-commerce platform that will allow you to offer the best experience for your customers, but also allow you to achieve your goals.

With the evolution of technology, but especially of your company, it can happen that your e-commerce platform is obsolete and no longer meets your needs adequately. Switching platforms can be quite a headache and consume a lot of time and money. It is therefore important to make sure that it is time for you to change, but also to find the best e-commerce platform for your current and future needs.

To help you, we’ve identified a few symptoms that will help you determine if it’s time to change your e-commerce site!

1. Technical platform issues affect your business operations

An e-commerce platform that is not suited to your needs or that is outdated can result in many technical issues. We are talking about the loss of information, difficulty in consulting data, perhaps that certain parameters no longer work properly, thus making your work more complex and tedious.

Technology issues may seem trivial at first glance, but they add up and can put pressure on other areas of your company.

Indeed, this could affect the marketing, sales or even business development departments. Most of these problems turn into a waste of time and money, which puts the brakes on the company.

2. The platform is not safe

Computer security and data protection are issues that are increasingly present in our lives. Not only to protect the owners of the data but also to protect your company from a scandal.

In short, security should be at the top of your priority list. Especially with regard to your e-commerce platform, since you collect so-called sensitive personnel data, such as addresses and banking information. 

A great way to make sure your platform is secure is to use a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. SSL is a complementary security protocol that is added to HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to secure connections from a web browser.

HTTPS is also important today, as it helps protect users more effectively by using an encrypted SSL server to scramble client information. In short, HTTPS is a solution of paramount importance to allow you to protect the data of your customers, but also your reputation.

Besides this protocol, there are also other ways to check if your platform is secure. However, the older the platform, the more likely it is that these security measures are no longer adequate today.

3. Data collection

Data collection is essential for marketers and for virtual merchants. However, not all e-commerce platforms collect all the data, and sometimes it is not what you need.

Additionally, many platforms do not provide clear or detailed enough data analysis reports. This makes it more complex and time-consuming to see what causes your potential customers to leave your site or abandon their cart.

To support the growth of your business, it is important to collect the right information, but also to know how to analyze it well through reports worthy of the name.

So, if your platform does not allow you to collect the right data and in sufficient quantity, it may be time to change your e-commerce site.

4. Inability to meet your customer's needs

Customers have much more decision-making power today than they did 5 or even 10 years ago. They are used to consuming what they want, where they want, and when they want. In fact, there are now so many varied offers that they are not afraid to look elsewhere if the site they are on does not meet their expectations.

So, if your e-commerce platform is not suitable for our target audience, it is quite possible that it is not the ideal solution and that you should consider changing your e-commerce site. Users are looking for a lot of features, and therefore, if a platform does not have these features, it can result in a loss of customers.

For example, more and more customers don’t trust sites that don’t offer the ability to pay with PayPal. So if your e-commerce platform does not offer certain options it can negatively impact your sales.

5. A slowdown in SEO performance

Along with data collection, SEO is of utmost importance to your e-commerce. Indeed, if your site does not appear on search engines, you will have a hard time attracting new customers, driving traffic, and generating sales.

Unfortunately, some e-commerce platforms do not support certain features, such as Schema markup, which is essential for structuring microdata.

In addition, some e-commerce platforms use robot.txt files which prevent the crawling of certain pages. In fact, search engines do not like this kind of robots and penalize sites that use it.  

If you are having similar issues, it may be worth checking out other e-commerce options available to you.

6. A slowdown in site performance

The speed of your e-commerce site may not be an indicator of your platform’s performance, but it is still an indicator of the health of your site that can have a major negative impact on your sales.

If your site is slowing down, it is essential to correct the situation. Indeed, customers expect quality, but above all speed! This is why it is important that your site loads quickly, otherwise it shows in online traffic and sales!

There are many factors that can negatively impact your website load speed, many of which relate to the age of your platforms, design, and programming.

Hosting is also another important factor when it comes to uploading speed. Indeed, some hosts may be unable to handle too much traffic, which will have the effect of slowing down the loading of the site. 

To find out more about hosting or to change host, contact an expert at Globalia!

If you have any questions or need help choosing or implementing your new e-commerce solution, please don’t hesitate to contact us!