5 Minute Read

Don’t let television commercials or inexperienced developers fool you. It’s not easy to build and maintain an enterprise-scale eCommerce website. Things can get out of hand, FAST, if you don’t have the right team running and updating your eCommerce site, and working side by side with you to continuously grow your online presence.

And we don’t need to tell you how out of hand it can get. You already know. It’s why you’re here. A dumpster fire of a website is serious business - and can seriously affect your business. Anything from buggy chat bots to unreliable systems integrations to a poor mobile experience (and so on) can all be the nail in the coffin for your eCommerce website sales margins. You spent your money on it - shouldn’t it work for you? And shouldn’t you have an experienced, certified team in place to help you when the user experience breaks down due to glitches beyond your control? That’s where Smart Solutions comes in. In this blog, we’ll break down all the ways we can meet your hot mess website where it’s at and rescue it - and your business - to get you back on track and better than ever.

Initial Considerations

Need help with some obvious issues wreaking havoc?

Security and Compliance

Although often treated the same, security and compliance in eCommerce site development and maintenance require site managers and developers to consider significantly different factors. When figuring out how to secure your eCommerce site, it’s important to consider data privacy, specifically as it relates to payment processing, assuring the standards set by ISO are followed, you are using trusted protocols such as SSL and HTTPS, and you’re protected against DDoS and malware attacks.

Compliance requires your team to assure the standards set by governments and industries involved in eCommerce such as credit card processors. Some often-overlooked compliance standards include California’s Consumer Protection Act which enacts the same requirements as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and ADA compliance which requires eCommerce companies to accommodate disabled website users. ADA compliance can be tricky, so it’s recommended that a professional 3rd party independent auditor, that conducts live disabled-user testing, audit your eCommerce site for compliance to document all non-compliance issues and recommend changes.


User Experience

The visual design and user flow can make or break your site. eCommerce experts are able to assure the online shopping experience of your site is in line with user expectations and best practices, and eliminate the impediments and difficulties causing would-be customers to abandon shopping carts. User’s design expectations are rapidly changing and becoming increasingly more demanding. Failure to update your site’s look and feel sends a message to the user suggesting overall experience is likely to be poor. Issues such as defective filter functionality or inadequate site search can make finding items impossible for prospective customers.

Online shoppers now expect the checkout process to require minimal data entry and far fewer screens than in days past. Creating too many steps between identification of a product the customer wants and finalizing the sale results in abandonment in the checkout process. Hidden fees and shipping costs can also lead to customers abandoning the checkout process. Expert site designers with UI/UX experience know how to eliminate these impediments.

Functionality

That tangled heap of an eCommerce site that you rely on to feed your family doesn’t have to be so messy. Functionality is different from user experience because while it can affect the prospective buyer, it can also affect maintenance, updates, and scaling your site’s footprint and power. More users mean more money, but for an improperly designed eCommerce site, an influx of prospective customers can spell danger for site functionality.

If you have a dumpster fire of an eCommerce site on your hands, reach out to experts in site rescue. Engage a team that has jumped into a tangled mess of a website before and resolved issues causing poor experiences and lost revenue. A dumpster fire only creates stress and financial loss. Put your eCommerce site in the hands of the capable team at Smart Solutions.

Performance

When it comes to eCommerce speed, time really is money and a slow website inevitably means a higher bounce rate and lower conversion. It’s a simple fact that slow websites lose orders to fast websites and poor site performance reflects poorly on your company. Unhappy customers will go looking for the same products or services elsewhere. You’ve spent a lot of time, money, and effort on your eCommerce site. If your site takes too long to load, you alienate your customers as soon as they try to navigate your store. Not only do you lose a sale, but you’ve also wasted the money you spent building and marketing your store. To top it all off, with Google confirming that site speed is a critical ranking factor for both desktop and mobile, a slow website can drag your search ranking down, losing you potential customers and sales day after day after day.

Ensure your eCommerce website is the best that it can be. You might have the basics in place but is your eCommerce website as optimized as it can be? Smart Solutions is known for its ability to handle complex jobs. Trust us to help you improve your underperforming website.

Systems Integrations

When you scale and aggressively grow your eCommerce sales, it typically becomes harder to manage volume. To streamline processes, your online store needs to integrate other 3rd party systems to manage the critical parts of your business – accounting, inventory, sales, CRM, and marketing. When your growth strategy depends on these systems and integrations, you need to depend on THEM.

ECommerce integration is no easy job and is often considered an “after thought” as it’s a time-consuming process. Can you count on the integrity of your data across all of your business systems? Optimize your eCommerce website by implementing reliable synchronization between your storefront and back office applications. The Smart Solutions team of certified developers and integration partners know how to build a seamless backend infrastructure across all touchpoints.

Longer Term Considerations

Once the fires are under control and your blood pressure is no longer boiling, it would be best to step back and re-evaluate your overall online strategy and eCommerce platform options.

SaaS vs. Hosted

Oh boy, does eCommerce platform matter. Considerations from price to scalability to server maintenance and everything in between go into choosing the right eCommerce platform for your business. Experts that work with multiple platforms should be able to assess your business requirements and recommend the platform that’s right for your immediate needs and long term goals. First, a determination should be made of whether to leverage an open source solution or a SaaS eCommerce solution. In simple terms, SaaS is a service that you pay for and a hosted solution is a product you own or license. SaaS, also known as software on demand, provides access to software via the internet. Hosted solutions imply that you buy or license your software from a reputable publisher. You then install that software at a hosting center of your choice.

Platform

After determining whether your eCommerce site should leverage an open source or SaaS solution, eCommerce retailers have several options. For example, Adobe Commerce Cloud is a hosted solution that can leverage microservices through APIs and is highly customizable. The services used and the overall architecture can affect the ease of scaling your eCommerce website and both initial and ongoing costs. Shopify and BigCommerce are SaaS solutions. SaaS solutions are generally not as customizable, but choosing the right SaaS platform may eliminate some maintainability concerns for eCommerce retailers.

TL;DR

The technicality of building and then maintaining an enterprise-scale eCommerce website is no easy task and, when taken on by an inexperienced team, often leads to a poorly functioning or even non-functioning website. It requires a true eCommerce partner and a team with the knowledge-base, experience, and expertise behind them to back-up their promise of delivering and maintaining your site at its most optimal level. At Smart Solutions, we have over 15 years of eCommerce expertise and we’re ready to become your strategic partner. Let us know how we can help.

We’re ready for you.