Ecommerce MAXed

3) How well are you converting traffic and maximizing your profit?

1. How can you increase your Conversions?
   
2. Trust – Are you doing all the basics to show you are trustworthy?
   
3. Is the checkout process easy and re-assuring? Do you have a way to re-engage abandoned carts?
4. Analytics - What’s the score? i. What are you tracking? ii. How are you making it actionable?
5. Optimization – Are you doing multivariate testing for your important/profitable pages (i.e. home, product & checkout)
6. How can you improve the User Experience?
   
1. Information Architecture
   
1. Is your navigation simple and clear? Where are people getting confused?
   
2. Do you offer multiple filtering capabilities?
   
2. Does on site search work really well?
   
3. Are you merchandizing your products in an appealing way?
   
4. Are you using ratings & reviews?
   
5. Are you providing educational guides, product recommendations and customization tools?
   
6. Do you have multi-media? How-To Video’s?
   
7. What are you doing to increase your average order size
   
1. Up Selling
   
2. Cross Selling
   
3. Promotions
   
1. Are you testing which are most profitable?
   
2. Are you getting your vendors to support you?

2) Are you making yourself visible to all potential customers?

1. How good is your SEO?
2. Are you doing the basics for On-site SEO? How about beyond the basics?
3. Off site - are you getting quality links? Do you have a strategy?
4. Are you using the shopping engines and are you optimized for them?
5. Are you optimizing your Google Product Feeds?
6. How well is your PPC performing? Did you try it and give up on it?
7. Are you in marketplaces like eBay or Amazon?
   
1. Should you be on them? (it’s not as simple as you might think)
   
2. How much can you really sell there? (a ton)
8. Are you using RSS product feeds?
9. Are you using trigger-based emails?
10. Are you doing things like “deal-a-day” promotions?
11. Are you blogging?
12. What’s the health of your affiliate programs?
13. Have you looked into creating micro sites that appeal to different segments of you marketplace? Would you like to become you own competition?
14. Are you working at increasing international business?

Maybe it’s time to look at all aspects of your business with new eyes. Seek improvement across the board.

Perhaps you’ll find the skill sets and competitive advantages that got you to this point need to evolve. It’s no longer enough to be really good a just a few things.

In this series, we’ll look at four areas where you can improve. Starting with…

1) How well are you dealing with the technical side of your business?

   1. As you grow, are you using technology to improve the efficiency of your processes (shipping, inventory, CRM, warehouse management etc.) or are you throwing more bodies at the problem?
   2. Are you using custom tools to make your site more valuable to customers, improve search results and create competitive barriers to entry?
   3. Are you doing enterprise ecommerce hosting or are you still trying to do it on the cheap?