How To Organise The Optimisation Of Your eCommerce Website

How To Organise The Optimisation Of Your eCommerce Website

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When you run an online retail business, there is always work to do. You need to figure out what you are buying, figure out how to merchandise it, respond to customer issues, attend to the bookkeeping and to the marketing.

You know that you should be working at optimising your site as much as possible, but once it is up and running there are so many details to tend to and optimisation is such an undertaking, it is hard to make the commitment to that kind of chore.

Well, nothing ever gets done that way. As with anything else, if you want to get a big task accomplished, you need to break into smaller, more manageable tasks instead.

Site optimisation has so many moving parts that it can be hard to know where to start and exactly what to do. Brendan Regan of Future Now has developed an approach that helps website owners and managers to move from optimisation paralysis to making regular incremental improvements, slowly advancing their sites performance.

It may not be the perfect way to optimise, but it is much better than not getting started at all because it is too much to do.

His technique is called the hierarchy of optimisation. He uses a pyramid with building blocks to show the steps to consider in any optimisation, overall site or operation of a page or function within a site:

- Bottom step of pyramid, Functional, Does it do what I need?

- 4th step, Accessible, can everyone access it?

- 3rd step, Usable is it user friendly?

- 2nd step, Intuitive, does it feel natural and not force me to think?

- Top step of pyramid, Persuasive, Do people really want and understand what they are buying?

Try using this hierarchical pyramid to analyse just a small portion of your website. Take your breadcrumb trail, for example (You do have one, don’t you? You know, the little tracker that tells you how deep into the site you are and how to get back out again?). Most shopping sites have at least a breadcrumb trail for their shopping cart function that shows something like:
Order, shipping, payment, confirmation, complete, Back to shopping.

Walk through the analysis of the trail.

- Functional: Does the breadcrumb trail work? Is it on every shopping cart page? Can you click on each component and get back to that area?

- Accessible: Is the type large enough to read? Is the trail in a noticeable place on the page? Is there enough color contrast for someone with low vision to find it?

- Usable: Does it make sense for someone to use it, i.e. does the shopping cart keep information intact if they go back and forth on the breadcrumb trail? If the information is lost, your breadcrumb trail is not usable or in fact functional from the customers point of view.

- Intuitive: Is it clear that you just click to go back? Do the components all look like hyperlinks, indicating where you will land if you click on it? Do the categories obviously correspond to the shopping cart actions?

- Persuasive: Does the breadcrumb trail inspire confidence in the stability of the shopping cart so the customer knows they can go back and forth, shop around and not end up having to repeat steps like filling in demographic info? If there is automatic erasure of credit card info when going backward, is there a warning or at least an explanation and a suggestion to register so the info will fill in again with a click?

There, not so hard at all and you have taken steps towards optimising your site.

You may also like to see the following articles:

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• Five Ways to Push the Shopping Cart through Check Out
• Pundits Predict A Profitable Christmas Holiday Season For E-Commerce Retailers in 2009
• The Psychology Of Sales Writing – How To Write Effective Sales Copy
• How To Increase Your Shopping Cart Conversion Rates