Site makeovers: A Regular Refresh is Essential to e-Commerce
E-commerce is in its boom years, having grown in 2007 nearly 6 times faster than total U.S. retailing, according to Internet Retailer magazine. Last year, online sales reached $165.9 billion, or 21.8% growth year on year, and this is only consumer sales, not including B-to-B. As a point of comparison, total retail sales grew only 3.9%, to $2.41 trillion.
U.S. Internet retailing is now more than a decade old, and developing a new level of maturity born from experience. Site redesign has emerged as a critical “must-do” for successful etailers who want to keep ahead of changing consumer tastes as well as emerging technological options for serving customers. Let’s look at some examples of the whys, hows and results of some recent ecommerce site makeovers.
Concerns that their conversions and sales were suboptimal, the spectacles etailer bestbuyeyeglasses.com hired a web strategy consulting firm to analyze their site, and found several opportunities for change:
- A new shopping cart that focused on both improved customer experience and better search engine rankings.
- A more powerful on-site search tool, dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine, which allows faster and broader searches among the site’s 40,000 SKUs.
- Analytic tools to assess customer on-site behavior and identify promotional opportunities in real time.
The improvements resulted in conversion increase of 7% and a sales jump of 23%.