5 min read

What your eCommerce manager never tells you

Care to share?

Talking about problems is hard. Looking for new business opportunities at Divante, we often reach out directly to eCommerce managers who are at the forefront of the online selling struggle. There’s a couple of eCommerce issues that they don’t talk about and rarely share them up the chain of command.

You might have never heard about any of these problems. They are pushed back by an avalanche of everyday tasks, denied, or not even acknowledged by eCommerce managers. Yet, they’re still there waiting to be addressed. In fact, they’re crucial to look at if you want to plan your online business for the long term.

1. “Our webshop tech is outdated.”

What’s the state of your eCommerce technology? Most CEOs will probably say that it’s “not great, not terrible.” You know it works, it sells, but the team encounters some minor issues now and then.

With fierce competition in the eCommerce market, that won’t do. Technology can quickly become obsolete and slow you down. You’ll see the other shops outpace yours in Google’s ranking, and you won’t even know why. 

It may not be obvious for your eCommerce manager either. When you keep your mind busy struggling for conversions and pushing products, it’s easy to overlook the big game being played in the background. They simply won’t know that there are some modern solutions worth exploring. Not to mention that changing tech is also a major struggle and will push them outside of their comfort zone.

Your tech won’t be eternal, but your struggle to keep it up to date should be. You don’t want to end up as the slowest gunslinger.

Tips: 

2. “Our eCommerce metrics aren’t THAT accurate.” 

eCommerce is a numbers game. At Divante, we’re shuffling between a couple of solutions that collect data on traffic, and Google Analytics isn’t the most accurate of them. eCommerce managers are rarely aware of these issues.

Tracking users and collecting data isn’t getting easier, either. The cookie apocalypse is upon us. If you haven’t heard about that yet, it can wipe out a lot of useful data you collect about your users.

What’s more, some results are naturally fluctuating in daily, weekly, and monthly cycles. That provides a lot of space for creativity in presenting statistics and can influence your ability to evaluate the results. It can create a distorted image of your business. 

Tips:

3. “Our results are s***.”

Too many eCommerce businesses settle for mediocrity. It’s a waste of potential.

The problem is that you don’t have a good point of reference. Is 2% conversion good or bad? It depends. The best way to approach this is to analyze your previous results and determine what’s causing any changes with experiments. You collect the new data, conduct A/B tests, and choose the most effective approach. You get better and better with every step.

There are small changes, and there are big changes, too. You can, for example, migrate to a new eCommerce platform and see a 237% revenue growth in the mobile channel. You might switch to progressive web apps (PWAs) to provide a real boost to user experience. Those opportunities might be difficult to spot when you’re elbows deep in the microscopic A/B testing level. 

Tips:

  • Keep experimenting with A/B testing.
  • Set aside some time every couple of weeks to look through tech innovations in the eCommerce market.

4. “Changes to our webshop are easy.” 

This one is different. You won’t hear an eCommerce manager say that it’s easy to change things because it rarely is

Marketers constantly struggle with content management systems (CMSs). It’s almost core to a marketer’s culture to keep complaining about managing content on their websites. It’s never easier for eCommerce companies. The tech tends to get in the way of agile marketing.

New eCommerce solutions, however, come up with ways to make it much easier. We have lightweight, bodiless front ends, headless commerce engines, product information management (PIM) platforms, and other tools to cut the time to market and keep changes under control

Tips:

5. “Hey, did you know you can actually automate my tasks?” 

Automation changes the structure of the job market. For example, you don’t see as many laundry workers as a hundred years ago, and their job description has changed a lot. They operate machines instead of handwashing clothes.

This kind of change is often scary. While you might not be scared about a robot backflipping right into your office chair, your eCommerce manager might have a different take on this. Managing product data, analyzing and finding patterns, reporting, and building marketing campaigns can all be automated to a certain degree. 

But what automation really does, contrary to the scaremongering, is free up eCommerce managers’ time. It elevates their work. It gives them the opportunity to really manage those automated solutions and tweak the settings instead of plowing through spreadsheets cell by cell.

For example, if you build your empire on Shopify Plus, Shopify Flow can take over the repetitive tasks. You can use it to create automated processes within your eCommerce. There’re Shopify Scripts to automate discount rules and codes, and Launchpad to manage sales events. Those solutions are really smart now, but they still need an eCommerce manager as a supervisor.

Tips:

  • Discuss tracking working hours with your eCommerce manager. Now, they can easily take it the wrong way. What you need to do is clarify that it’s for their benefit, and you don’t even need to see the data. You want them to discover the repetitive work in their schedule and understand that a proper solution can free them from this burden. 
  • Check out some of the top eCommerce solutions that can help you level up your eCommerce.

Talking about eCommerce issues

These are just some of the topics we noticed that are troubling companies across the eCommerce industry. This article opens our series on eCommerce issues. If you want to see what the future brings, sign up for our newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn. We’ll present the solutions to some of the common issues that every shop has to go through. 

Many of the issues mentioned above are connected to the tech side of commerce, which is our bread and butter. If you want to catch up with the market and get a good overview of new possibilities, check out our complete introduction with 14 essential tools for modern eCommerce

If you’re facing a pressing problem, there’s also an easier way to get the answers. Simply reach out to us to talk about your challenge, and we’ll come up with proper solutions for your business.

Published September 30, 2021