A retailer's life is a busy one, managing the day-to-day operations alongside planning for new promotions and sales.

In addition there is the need to be aware of trends and keep up the search for new products. And for many there is now the added dimension that comes with the operation of an ecommerce website. With over 20% of ALL UK retail sales happening on the iIternet and 10 million consumers already making transactions on a mobile, smartphone or tablet, the need to keep your ecommerce storefront updated is relentless.

Review and refine

Sitemakers are often asked to review ecommerce websites for retailers and we find that well over 50% of these appraisals show that the site has not changed for over a year. We are in the era of web savvy consumers and they are often even more critical of ecommerce websites than our reviewing team. The canny buying public will decide rapidly how good a website looks, feels and navigates but, more important than this, they will expect it to work with current features they see on other sites when searching and buying from the Internet.

If your website has not been updated or improved since last year the chances are it will be missing key new features and may be limiting access to the growing market of smartphone and tablet users; have you tested your site to see if it works on the iPhone and Android based smartphones? Over 10 million people bought retail items online via their mobiles in 2010.

On top of this, the popular web browsers have had major updates recently so both Firefox and Internet Explorer, to name just two, will be looking at website code in a significantly different way from last year. This means that even if you are still viewing your ecommerce site on last year’s version of a web browser, many of your ecommerce visitors will be accessing web pages on this year’s shiny new version, so it is important that it works for them as well.

Keeping up with change

It’s one thing to have the latest products and prices on your ecommerce website along with the latest display features to show them off. However, unless you have processes in place to review, change and market these products on a daily basis, you may not achieve the sales you need from the site.

Now that we have reached 20% of all UK retail sales happening on the Internet, there is no excuse for leaving your ecommerce website to run itself. Just as you would always have a staff member in a retail high street store, the same applies for online.

Yes, there is some clever coding embedded in good ecommerce sites that will take away the repetition of tasks such as deciding that to do when a product runs out of stock, but this does not replace an individual retailer’s knowledge and experience to just know what works and why.

Where possible, you need to set aside time each day when you review the homepage of your site, the most popular and visible products and sections, and tune the content based on your retailer expertise coupled with looking at your sales and site statistics. Of course this means that you must have the ability to make these adjustments immediately. Good ecommerce platforms will have a content management system (CMS) that gives you the ability to amend, preview and enact changes instantly. If this is not the case, and amendments to your website require a third party supplier and a turnaround time that is not under your control, then it’s time to look for a replacement !

Sitemakers can carry out an extensive and confidential ecommerce website review for your existing site,  click here for more details