Your eCommerce Checklist for Success

In a brick-and-mortar location, you have things that must be done daily, weekly, and monthly to keep the store open and operating smoothly. You need to sweep the floors, restock the shelves, reorder items, install new sale signage, and more. Running a successful eCommerce store requires nothing less.

But of course, you don’t need to sweep the floors in your eCommerce store. Your virtual store has no shelves to restock, and you can change the signage with the click of a mouse in most cases. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that should be done regularly in order to find success.

Daily Upkeep

Social Media Outreach: Social media is always turned on, and you need to manage your presence daily. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can spread yourself across all social networks. That would be a foolish waste of time and resources. Instead, identify the best social networks for your eCommerce business and then build a thriving presence through daily posts, interactions, replies to comments, shares, and more.

Customer Service: You must be there for your customers when they need you. While you might not have the ability to deliver customer service 24/7, you need to get as close as possible. Go through your support requests daily. Hourly is better if you can afford to have a full-time customer support specialist. The more prompt your support, the better the overall customer experience will be.

Website Maintenance: Your website should be maintained daily. This actually covers a very broad range of things, from updating your inventory to checking for dead links to setting new sales prices. Anything that requires a change to your eCommerce site falls under the website maintenance heading, and you must promptly handle these tasks.

Product Copy Creation: Technically, this falls under website maintenance, as new product descriptions should be developed during inventory management. However, it’s so critical that we’ve given it a separate heading. Every product needs to have an original, evocative, compelling description optimised for both SEO and human beings. Never reuse the manufacturer’s description, either, as it can lead to duplicate content issues.

Weekly

Email Marketing: Email marketing offers a lot of potential, but you must go about it the right way. A weekly email to your contacts can help keep them in the loop, highlight relevant new items in your shop, and provide useful information, all without overwhelming them. As you grow, you may find that some email types need to be sent more than once per week, but it’s always best to err on the side of fewer rather than too frequent communications.

Market Research: Conduct research on your market every week. This includes delving into what your competitors are doing, new technology changes that could impact your business, and more. It also means digging into what your customers want and changes in their buying habits.

Ad Creation: Digital ad creation through Facebook, Google Ads, and other platforms is something that you should at least consider weekly. At least one aspect of your strategy should occur regularly, whether that’s beginning an A/B test, customising your customer personas, or something else. Without digital ads, you’re missing one of the most powerful tools for building awareness.

Monthly

Content Development: At a minimum, you need to hone your digital marketing strategy monthly. Plan out new content, where it will be used, what pages each piece will link to within your website, and more.

Customer Experience Research: Once each month, take a trip through your website like you were a customer. What’s the experience like? How does it stand up to your competitors? Is it easy to find the products you want? An honest, critical assessment of the customer experience will help you uncover weaknesses that need to be addressed, as well as strengths that you can build on.

Find the Help You Need

As you can see, there are many things that must be done regularly in order to run a successful eCommerce business. Many of these are time-consuming and take you away from what you do best. When in a pinch, don’t be afraid to outsource some of these needs to a company that understands what’s required to achieve success in the Irish eCommerce industry and internationally.