3 eCommerce Optimization Steps Small Businesses Should Take Right Now

For quite a while now, there's been evidence that eCommerce was marching inexorably to dominance over in-person brick-and-mortar sales. Even to the untrained eye, the meteoric rise of Amazon was enough to make that clear. But for many small businesses, going digital just wasn't on the agenda. Some thought it fruitless to engage online with competitors already dominating the market. Others favored building the local customer bases that sustained their bottom lines.

Then, along came the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and everything changed.

With almost no notice, countless small businesses around the world had to scramble to build up a digital sales presence from thin air. With their retail locations shuttered, their very survival depended on it. In the process, though, many created new eCommerce sites that won't stand the test of time. And now that it's becoming clear that the forced shift to digital might become a permanent part of the post-coronavirus economy, it's time they circle back and prepare for the new normal to come.

One of the things they're going to have to do is to fine-tune their eCommerce sites to make them more effective at converting visitors to customers. The reason this is vital is that once the eCommerce boom created by the coronavirus subsides, the landscape will still remain crowded with competitors. To capture the biggest slice of their market, here are three things small businesses need to start doing to optimize their eCommerce operations right now.

Conduct an Audience Analysis

The first step in fine-tuning an eCommerce website with an eye toward conversion rate optimization is to figure out who the website is serving and why they're showing up. After all, you can't convert a visitor into a customer if you don't know what they want from you. An excellent place to start doing this is by simply talking to your best customers and asking them some basic questions, including:

●  What are the most common reasons you shop with us online?

●  Are there any parts of your digital experience with us that you found difficult?

●  Is there anything in the process that has stopped you from making a purchase?

●  Is there anything we could be doing to make your online experience better?

By taking the temperature of your best customers, you should end up with a broad idea of what the eCommerce site is doing right and what might need improvement. If there's no clear consensus, that's fine – just keep asking as many customers the same questions as possible to gain some additional clarity. If you're dealing with a large number of customers, consider using an online survey platform to conduct your audience research.

Learn How to use A/B Testing

Once some areas in need of improvements are identified, the next thing to do is try to find the best solution to the problems. But that can't be done through trial and error. Instead, it's necessary to conduct tests of any proposed changes to compare their performance against the status quo. The process for doing this with an eCommerce site is known as A/B testing (or multivariate testing if you're comparing several page variations at once).

Although it may sound like this process is difficult, it's not as hard as you might imagine. The first step is to get the site configured to use a testing platform, like Google Optimize. It offers a one-stop-shop to conduct A/B testing, often at no cost. Then, decide on a single variable to alter on a given page, using the earlier customer feedback as a guide. Consider changing things like graphical elements, headlines, and sales copy. Then, use the testing platform to make the changes you want to test.

In the case of Google's Optimize, you can use a built-in graphical page editor to make the changes. That means it's not necessary to pull apart the site's code to test out a variant. And once you've made the changes, chosen a target goal (like higher clickthrough rate, longer time-on-site, etc.), and started the test, all you have to do is sit back and see how well your changes work.

Another great option is to turn to a more automated conversion optimization platform like the one offered by Convincely. It's a plug-and-play solution that outsources the ongoing work of A/B testing to create an ongoing improvement loop to every part of your website. For busy small business owners, it's an option that offers monthly increases in conversion rate without all of the hands-on work that would normally come with it.

Consider Personalization

After getting some experience with A/B testing, it might become apparent that there's no one-size-fits-all approach that satisfies every customer. For example, it might become apparent that younger customers prefer one style of sales path through your eCommerce site while older customers need something different. When you consider that all of the available data points to likely increases in eCommerce purchases by multiple age groups going forward, choosing just one to focus on isn't a viable option.

The good news is, you don't have to make that kind of choice. Instead, the right way forward is to consider a strategy that leverages personalization. It's a best-of-all-worlds approach that allows you to deliver the right experience to the right customers on every visit. There are a variety of personalization software options available to facilitate this, many of which also offer advanced site testing and analytics built-in. They allow even the smallest of eCommerce shops to use the same kind of ultra-specific personalization tricks that have made Amazon into the trillion-dollar juggernaut it is today.

Thriving in the eCommerce Future

By taking action right now to improve their eCommerce operations, small businesses should be well-positioned to take advantage of the long-term market growth created by the coronavirus pandemic. They'll also have a head start on their competitors that fail to realize that their early online success is a byproduct of surging demand, and isn't likely to last. In the end, their hard work now should secure for them a thriving eCommerce future. And in the wake of this unprecedented economic time, doing so offers the possibility of finding a silver lining to what is otherwise the biggest challenge of most small business's lifetimes.