Top Tips for Running a Successful eCommerce Site

Speed

Your website's speed is one of the biggest reasons users will leave your eCommerce website. 50% of shoppers will leave if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, so you really can't afford to have a slow e-commerce website. Things like embedded YouTube videos and Twitter widgets will increase load time, and you can rectify this by removing them from product pages and keeping them only on the home page. Returning customers spend on average 3 times more than new ones, so by caching images, text and videos, you can increase load time for people coming back to your website. Try compressing your images, too - over 45% of e-commerce sites don't.

Mobile Optimisation

There are over a billion smartphones in the world at the moment, fast approaching the 2 billion mark. Since Google algorithm change in April, they favour mobile-friendliness when ranking sites. Because of this, the more mobile visitors your site gets, the higher it will appear in the search engines. This is crucial especially to take advantage of the ever-increasing number of people who shop online; 30% of last year's Christmas shopping was done online. 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

With the e-commerce scene becoming increasingly crowded, you can't afford to slack on the SEO front. As well as meta keywords, a search-friendly URL and fresh content, the search engines will also take into account 

Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance

If you are a merchant of any size accepting credit cards, you must be in compliance with PCI Security Council standards. Launched in 2006, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that all companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. It covers areas such as maintaining a secure network, protecting cardholder data, and regular testing of networks. Prospective customers need to know that you are handing their sensitive data in a professional, responsible way.

Downtime

Downtime is the worst case scenario for any e-commerce site, and can result in massive losses both financially and in terms of your reputation. The three main causes of downtime are hardware/security problems, operational errors, and application failures.