10 tips for successful launch of your eсommerce website. Part 1
Imagine that your eCommerce project is now under development. How to make sure that programmers will make things right?
DrupalJedi have collected the most common moments which you should keep in mind and check before the launch your website.
1. Availability of all products and prices on the site
If you have only 25–35 products on your eCommerce website, you can solve this problem quickly. It’s enough to walk through the pages and check all prices and products exist. You can be confident that everything works right only if you have seen it yourself.
Why can prices be wrong? For example, you need to test a purchase process in real conditions of 10 browsers. To prevent from spending money on transactions of large sums while testing, developers put a small price. It is necessary to check that these prices are not on the production site.
If you have a lot of products you will need additional tools to check an amount of products and price accuracy. For instance, you can use dashboard with filters and grouping. In a case with a dynamic set of products (everyday import from third-party systems), you will need summary screens.
Screens may contain the number of updated products for the last unloading, examples of added and deleted products, total number of products in the system. It is difficult to list all possible parameters because they depend on your e-commerce website specialization. The idea is to get a few simple slices that reflect a current situation. It could be an amount of goods in any category or products which are in stock now or not available.
In addition to reviewing the missing items, you must make sure that there are no test items on the site. They can appear at the most unexpected moment and spoil the client’s impression. So you’d better delete them from the production site.
2. Correct customer journey from selection to purchase
We guess it wouldn’t be surprising to you that the main process in eCommerce website is purchase.
That is why it is recommended to сheck the purchase process closely with different combinations of addresses/products/methods of payment and delivery before public release and make sure that user will see a message that his order sent for processing and you will see money on your account.
In different browsers, a website can behave differently in the same places.
So make sure you checked the ordering and payment processes in all the browser that you plan to support (at least the latest versions of the most popular Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE / Edge).
Also, check the same user behavior script on mobile devices.
Statistics show that 40% of users will go to the competitor after a bad mobile experience, yet an alarming 84% have experienced difficulty completing a mobile transaction. So it’s important!
3. Integrations with services
Almost every eCommerce website use at least one external service for accepting payments. Also, there are other services: email marketing services, delivery tracking services, accounting systems.
Most often, integration with these services works using APIs, which have different operating modes (sandbox / live) or separate accounts for different site instances — production and development, for example. It’s important to check that access to the accounts you need is configured on production site. Accounts should be in live mode.
Sandbox mode and test accounts should be used only on development instances. Sometimes developers copy a database from the production site. So you should be confident that production settings of external services are not copied too.
How to make sure everything is configured correctly?
You should go through all the customer journeys on site and check that all the data falls into the accounts that you expect.
4. Notified customer — satisfied customer
Every customer on your site worries for his purchase and money. That’s why it is good to accompany the client at every step. They will like your attention, but don’t cross the line with sending 100 emails to customer’s mailbox.
- Main letters such as “account are registered”, “successful order payment”, “password reset” should be on each site.
- We also recommend making your customer happier by sending him on email invoices, order status updates, tracking code and so on.
- Also check that letter author and subject are correct and keep in mind that letters could go to spam.
For these reasons you should thoroughly control all emails and its display (both web and mobile) during customer journey testing.
Ask your developers to realize correct and beautiful appearance of letters in every type of mail client Gmail(web + mobile), Apple mail, Outlook, Yahoo mail and others and take all necessary measures to reduce the risk of appearing in spam.
It should be noted that these tasks are rather difficult especially if you have promo letters on site because most of them have individual design and need separate slicing.
If the qualifications of the developers are not enough to meet these requirements, it makes sense to use specialized email marketing services such as MailChimp. They usually have templates of letters for all occasions.
Frequent developer’s mistake is mailing from test servers or instances to real customers.As same as with external services settings for the production environment, the reason is in database copying — real customer’s emails appear on test servers.
For example, abandoned cart email periodically comes to the clients who have not completed the purchase. As a result, a client gets 2 letters, one of which is not working. To prevent this problem make sure that developers have rules for removing real email addresses.
5. Secure connection
Today there is no reason NOT to use a secured connection via HTTPS for all pages of your site. Moreover, HTTPS certificates are free and use it on all site pages rather than certain pages is easier. Do you need HTTPS to your eCommerce website? Of course yes.
In the eyes of an ordinary user, simple green badge with the word “Secure” makes your site credible. Even your clients don’t know how it works.
In fact, it will help to strengthen the security of the essential aspects of the site — billing data and any contact forms on the site.
Moreover, we recommend asking your developers to use HTTP Strict Transport Security mechanism. It means that if someone occasionally tries to enter the site using unprotected HTTP connection, he will be automatically redirected to HTTPS.
Thank you for your attention! Please, share this article with those who think about launching eCommerce site. Hope our tips will be helpful.
If you have any questions you can contact us on website or by email hello@drupaljedi.com
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