Changing banners, launching new products, organizing site releases and optimizing merchandising shouldn’t require outside help. When ecommerce technology empowers non-technical business users to take full control of digital and customer experiences, online merchants unlock a hidden source of efficiency, profitability, and growth.
Let’s dive into 6 vital habits of highly effective ecommerce teams.
Habit 1: Keep it fresh
Productive teams never let their site experience go stale. Social and email campaigns push new content daily or multiple times per day — the website experience needs to keep up. Competitors aggressively push new products, new promotions, daily deals and timely themes. Fresh site content and merchandising keeps customers engaged and coming back for more.
“We make changes pretty much every day — at least during the work week. We try to update our home page visuals, deals, new product releases, things like that. At least two to four times a week we’ve changed something about the site.”
Rachael Gelowtski, Dir MIS & Ecommerce, Olympia Sports
Fresh content surprises and delights customers with brand stories that transcend the home page, enhances every touchpoint from product discovery through checkout, and looks good on all devices.
Habit 2: Stay ahead of the game
Effective digital teams are organized and operate ahead of schedule. Rather than constantly chasing (or missing) deadlines, they get the bulk of their work done ahead of schedule. They enjoy the flexibility to test and tweak, respond to real-time needs and opportunities, and continually develop creative new strategies.
Technology that supports pre-schedules deployments and rollbacks allows teams to confidently set-it-and-forget-it. Seek out innovative ecommerce tools that allow your team members to prepare, manage, and launch site updates in advance.
Habit 3: Do more with less
Modern commerce technology turns the non-technical business user into a triple-threat unicorn — a marketer, designer and advanced coder in one, allowing them to do it all without IT. Even when business users possess HTML or CSS skills, eliminating the coding process helps them get far more done in less time.
Leveled-up business users organize and deploy comprehensive site updates and move from idea to execution with rapid speed. Your core ecommerce tools should be comprehensive enough to deliver what you need: commerce, content, search and insights.
Habit 4: Forget staging
Efficient commerce teams cut the middleman between their strategic vision and the customer experience. They don’t wait for IT to bring Marketing’s plan to life on a separate server or risk that anything may fail in the push to production.
Instead, they take advantage of live preview capabilities within their own admin and thoroughly QA the form and functionality across pages and screen sizes, instantly.
Live previews within ecommerce platforms eliminate the unhappy surprises (and unhappy customers) that can result from staging-to-production mishaps. Why invite more hiccups into your process?
Habit 5: Seize timely opportunities
When site administrators have full control of the ecommerce experience at their fingertips, they can be responsive to customer behavior, social trends, and competitors’ moves in real time. Reacting to shifts, wherever their source, is an advantage for merchants looking to separate themselves from the pack.
If customers are buying up a specific item, feature it on your home page or within a category or in your email marketing.
Habit 6: Go home on time and sleep through the night
Highly effective commerce teams never scramble at the eleventh hour. They’re cool, calm and collected because they’re confident their site updates will publish exactly when they should. Automating promotions and sitewide changes saves time so teams aren’t staying awake until midnight to press publish.
“We’ve always pre-planned Releases because obviously neither myself nor any of my staff wants to get up in the middle of the night to shut off a promo has to go up at 3:00 AM or switch out our home pages based on a promotional period or a holiday.”
Lisa Dominish, Ecommerce Director at Rachel Roy
Life’s too short to worry about performance and stability during a predicted or unexpected traffic spike. A scalable ecommerce platform lets teams babysit their analytics, not their uptime.