Let’s face facts:
74% of people are likely to switch brands if they find the purchase process too difficult.
Providing a delightful end-to-end customer experience is vital to your company’s success and your e-commerce store experience is a key factor in ensuring customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat purchasing. Upgrading and/or migrating your e-commerce store is a really effective way of nailing the customer experience and setting your e-com business up for success in 2020 and beyond.
One thing we hear about time and time again-especially in Q1-is that e-commerce founders are hungry to overhaul their online store experience but aren’t quite sure where to start. So we rounded up some of the most knowledgeable experts from our top agency partners to participate in a live panel discussing all things e-commerce store upgrades. We called it Extreme E-Commerce Store Makeover!
Meet the experts:
- Greg Johnston: Managing Director of Toronto-based agency Be a Part Of. Greg joins the live panel as our BigCommerce expert!
- Chace Oldmixon: VP of Business Development of SAU/CAL. Chace joins the panel as our WooCommerce expert!
- Jason Stokes: CEO & Founder of UK-based agency Eastside.co. Jason joins the panel as our Shopify expert!
- Kelsey Burdett (that’s me!): Strategic Agency Partnerships Manager at Clearbanc and moderator of the panel.
Over the course of an hour, our experts answered everyone’s burning re-platforming questions including:
- How do I know if it’s time to upgrade or migrate my online platform?
- How can I best evaluate my platform options and build a wish list?
- What are some best practices for migrating and optimizing for the customer experience?
Watch the full recording to learn their best insights and top tips (and scroll down for some highlights from the hour-long discussion).
Extreme E-Commerce Store Makeover live recording
Panel highlights
Read on for some of the best take-aways from Extreme E-Commerce Store Makeover to help ensure a smooth and successful online store upgrade.
How to know it’s time to re-platform?
Re-platforming is a big job and has the potential to disrupt your business if not done at the right time and for the right reasons. To ensure your choosing the right time to re-platform, ask yourself:
- How has your store failed in critical moments?
- What integrations do you want to add to your store but don’t have the ability to?
- How common are workarounds vs clean solutions to things you want to fix on your store?
- Do you spend more time fixing broken components on your store or adding new features to your store?
How do you evaluate your options once you’ve determined it’s time upgrade/migrate?
So you’ve decided it’s now time to upgrade or migrate your store. But with so many items on your wish list, how do you prioritize and evaluate your options? Here’s what our experts recommend:
- Be super specific with your wish list. Go through everything you’re currently using on your platform and describe the ideal state
- If you’re working with an agency, come prepared with example sites and functionality you want to add
- Be as specific as possible
- Make sure each department is accounted for. Talk to all stakeholders and add their requirements to the list with as much detail as possible.
- Certain platforms are best for different types of businesses BUT don’t count any of them out completely because there’s a lot you can do with the introduction of headless commerce (which is when the storefront is de-coupled from the admin).
- Your team should have one point person, quarterbacking the project. Stakeholders from each department should be involved but the project manager should own the conversation
- Pick an agency partner to work with who has relevant experience in your vertical, platform, and with the specific functionality you want to add to your store
Best practices for conversion rate optimization
A. Best practices for the checkout process
- If you’re failing at checkout, it might actually be the pre-checkout that’s killing you. Make sure you have clear and favorable terms of service, privacy policy, return policy, FAQ, reviews…etc.
- Use data & metrics to evaluate where people are dropping off and run tests to see what positively impacts conversion rates
- Try adding free shipping (even if you have to increase your prices)
- Use tokenized payment gateways to speed up checkout flow
B. Best practices for utilizing payment gateways
- Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay are a must
- Paypal is helpful for international markets
- Split payments or ‘buy now pay later’ options are awesome for luxury goods
- Pro Tip: Rearrange your payment options to display the one you want to incentivize first (i.e. the one that has the lowest fees or the one that converts the best)
C. Hot tip for B2B businesses to improve conversion
- Best practice is to not require credit card details up front (if possible)
D. Hot tips for subscription businesses to improve conversion
- Always have ‘Subscribe and Save’ on product pages
- Promotions work wonders for subscription companies (the more complex the better)
- Need to be able to self-service (update their address, credit card, billing preferences…etc.)
