Closeup of businessman and woman discussing on stockmarket documents in office

Why do an eCommerce Audit you say?

Some may wonder why you would want to voluntarily do any kind of audit when you just got done with your taxes this year. Outside of the obvious reason to increase performance of your site and it’s sales, it simply boils down to this one fact…

“79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and ~44% will tell a friend if they had a poor experience”

source: kissmetrics.com

So if you are able to gain anything from an eCommerce audit it should be to understand what problems are causing your website to lose sales. The best way to perform these audits is to dive into your analytics to get a good understanding of your traffic’s behavior and how it relates back to your site’s design and page architecture. This can take some experience in understanding this data and might be more of a project than you are hoping for, so the next best option is to use our eCommerce Site Checklist Template to see if your site is following best practices.

Free eCommerce Audit Template

In the spirit of Spring Cleaning and the tax season deadline, I figured I’d give out an audit that people might actually appreciate. We perform audits for prospective and existing customer eCommerce sites to evaluate where they might be losing sales. We have developed our Website Audit Template specifically for eCommerce websites, and it has been extremely helpful so we wanted to share it with you. To get access to your own copy of the eCommerce site audit template (spreadsheet form), just click the text link or fill in your email at the bottom of the page to subscribe to our blog and get instant access!

If it sounds a whole lot easier to just have us perform an audit on your site or your client’s site… you’re in luck! We provide a free eCommerce site audit to those interested how to increase optimize their store for sales. If you are curious where you site is performing well and which areas are doing poorly, go ahead and request your Free eCommerce Website Audit here.  If you’re just curious what this eCommerce Audit stuff is all about, checkout out the 10 quick questions you should ask yourself in an eCommerce audit below.

10 Quick Questions: eCommerce Audit Checklist

  1. Does my site load in under 3 seconds? Over half of browsers leave after 3 seconds of load time.
  2. Is my home page and other primary pages Mobile Friendly? As of April 21st, 2015 Google’s mobile search algorithm’s will increase the significance of “mobile friendliness” as a ranking signal.
  3. Can users easily search my site from my home page? Search allows your most “ready to buy” customers to easily navigate to your product
  4. Can users reach their cart and account pages from every page on the website? If you want to increase sales, make it easy to reach the cart… simple as that.
  5. Does my home page show time sensitive/relative specials or content? The leading reason why online shoppers make a purchase during a website visit is to take advantage of a time sensitive special. Also relevant and recent content builds trust that there is an active business behind the site.
  6. Are breadcrumbs used for navigation through out my product catalog? Site visitors don’t always enter your website through your home or “shop” page, you will want to make sure navigation is easy in all entry scenarios.
  7. Do I have an abandoned cart email auto-responder setup? 88% of consumers have completely abandoned an online shopping cart without completing a transaction.
  8. Are Shipping, Return, & Exchange Policies clearly accessible from the home page? Building trust and being transparent turns browsers into buyers.
  9. Does my website route the customer to a third party to checkout? This is a bad practice for so many reasons we are saving it for a follow up blog post.
  10. Is my checkout killing sales? Shoppers are finicky and quick to jump ship. Make sure you allow a quick and easy checkout process with guest checkout, minimal fields, and several different payment options.

eCommerce Audit Template

audit-checklist-t

By | 2017-12-28T15:05:51-05:00 April 8th, 2015|

About the Author:

Analytics Addict, Outdoors Enthusiast, eCommerce/Marketing Blogger, & Startup Founder.