How To Perform An Audit Of Your eCommerce Website

The ecommerce store has been successfully developed and is driving up sales. Now, what next? Do I have to sit idle as I have done all my tasks for establishing my business or there is much more to achieve? Yes. After getting acquired in an ecommerce business, there is a lot to understand and manage while doing regular business management. For an ecommerce business, auditing is one of the most important to have an eye on your overall sales. With audits, you can get an overview of your business performance and detailed insights on numerous issues. You will come to know whether your ecommerce store is working as per your expectations or not. If you don’t conduct the audit of your ecommerce store, you will be missing numerous sales opportunities that would have come in your way. In this article, we are going to discuss all aspects of the ecommerce website audit.

What is Auditing of an Ecommerce Store?

You must be familiar with the term “Audit”, it means conducting a financial inspection to cover all aspects of your business. In ecommerce, it also covers all the crucial areas of the business such as SEO, content, site performance, conversion rate optimization, platform analysis, etc. It is the best way to discover the underlying issues and where you can make improvements. You will get a “post-sale blueprint” – a map of optimizing your business.

Why one must conduct an ecommerce business audit?

As an ecommerce store owner, you are expected to know every detail of your business. You should have complete info about how many products you have, how many orders you receive every month, and there are many other things that you should know to run your ecommerce store smoothly. But to know all such things, you need to do the audit of your ecommerce store. Below, we have listed the 6 reasons why you should conduct an audit of your ecommerce store and what are the benefits of it.

Also read: How to develop an eCommerce website

Customers browse a website that works smoothly

Nobody is perfect and even highly experienced developers make mistakes. It implies that developing a website is hard and you can’t keep an eye for every error. Unfortunately, customers don’t understand this, and they will abandon your site after facing just one error.

Even a delay of one second can make you lose your potential patrons. You should check your site not as the owner but as a wandering customer and find an answer for questions such as:

• Are the pages and images loading in a proper manner?
• Do pages time-out?
• Are the pages taking too much time in loading?
• Do the clickable links and navigation work properly?
• Is there any grammatical or spelling error in the content?
• Does all content is up-to-date?
• What happens on hitting the 404 error page?

Answers to these questions can easily help you identify areas for improvement around your store, which will have an enormously positive impact on the customer experience.

Customers buy products on different browsers and different devices

As per the W3schools report, 80.7% of the users use Google Chrome, 8.5% use Firefox, 4.1% use Safari, and rest others. These stats show that it is important that your ecommerce website is responsive across all browsers.

And as the world is going mobile, it is also highly important that your ecommerce store should perform well on mobile as well. You would be surprised to know that 40% of users have gone to a competitor’s website after a poor mobile experience. Through an audit, you will come to know:

• How does your store look and function across the different desktop browsers?
• Is it user-friendly on mobile devices too?
• Are the images clear?
• Does the user need to pinch and zoom on the smartphone?
• Is it easy to browse and purchase products through the smartphone?

Learn more: How to develop a mobile-friendly eCommerce website

Searching and Filters

Most of the users tend to search their products directly on the site rather than finding through navigation or categories. A good search should be quick, making a better shopping experience and less frustrating to the customers. The search functionality allows the user to find what they require without any fuss. It is not just limited to improving the UX but also helps in a better conversion rate and also reduces the cart abandonment rates. You need to check the search and filter functionality and find answers for these questions:

• Are the filters accurate?
• Does the product category make sense?
• Are there any products that are not properly organized?
• Is the search function providing proper results?

Cart Abandonment Rate

Do you know that every year customers leave goods of worth $4 trillion in their abandoned shopping carts? Fortunately, now the stores can recover nearly two-thirds of those lost sales. But for this, you need to re-engage the customers. Add products to your store cart and then abandon it, and find answers for these questions:

• Is there any pop-up of re-engagement so that I would be compelled to purchase the product?
• Do I get any message or mail notifying me of an abandoned cart?
• Are there recommendations for other products I may want to purchase instead?

High standard of customer service

More than half of the customers can pay for better customer service. The best example is Amazon Prime, where customers are ready to pay for just one-day delivery. This is a motivating factor to ‘wow’ your customers. As a store owner, you should focus on what are the current needs of your customers, how you are lacking them, and how you can provide them. You need to find the current trends and implement them in your online store. For e.g. as the voice search, chatbots, image search, AI, AR, and VR, are among the new ecommerce trends, then you should find out the ways to implement them on your site. Some of the other measures are:

• How is customer care service?
• How much time does your team take to respond to the customer query?
• Are the customer service reps effective at communicating their answer?

What includes in Ecommerce Site Auditing?

In an ecommerce site auditing, it is recommended to cast a wide net for discovering as many opportunities as possible. As an ecommerce store owner, you need to take note of any findings. Ecommerce site auditing is divided into three core parts – SEO, Platform, and Conversion Rate. Let’s discuss each in detail…

SEO Audit

Strong SEO of your ecommerce store improves the visibility of your store on the search engines. It brings the traffic and when the user finds your store, they reach as visitors but return as loyal patrons. There are lots of SEO practices you need to follow but from an ecommerce perspective, you can focus on whether product pages are visible to both the user and search engines. Here are some important points:

• How to handle expired products? You can handle expired products/content, or out-of-stock items, including redirecting and products linking. The best strategy depends on the particular scenario at that time.
• How to manage new products? While adding a new product, SEO plays an important role in defining its success. It is important to check recent product launches to see how the previous owner has set the products up.
• Does the product page contain thin content? You can put many efforts to improve the content. You must add details to the thin posts for improving the quality, usefulness, and keyword optimization.
• Do you have strong internal linking? The users should be able to easily navigate through your ecommerce store. The best way to do this is to interlink products to other products and category pages to products.
• Do Related Products Organize? Related products must be organized alphabetically, chronologically, geographically.
• What is the quality of product images? The UI is highly important in ecommerce store and also a search engine factor the optimization of images while deciding the page ranking.
• Pagespeed: The speed of the site is also an important factor in search engine rankings. There are many online tools that you can use for measuring and optimizing your site speed such as:
  • Google PageSpeed Insights
  • GTmetrix
  • Pingdom Tools
  • WebPageTest
  • Think With Google
  • Core Web Vitals in Search Console
  • Chrome Dev Tools

Learn More: How To Perform Speed Optimization For A Shopify Store

Some other tools for a comprehensive audit of eCommerce website

• Semrush
• Ahref
• ScreamingFrog
• Xenu
• Moz Tools

Platform Audit

A right ecommerce platform is highly important for the success of your online business. During the auditing, you need to also give an eye to check whether your chosen ecommerce platform is meeting all your requirements or not. If not then you may have to look for a switch. If the sales are gradually decreasing or the number of new customers is also decreasing then it may worth knowing whether the platform is still appropriate for your business needs. A well-executed platform change can generate a strong uplift in sales. You may have to check these factors…

• Better User Experience: Site navigation, platform speed, imaging, payment checkout, searching, admin panel, are some of the features which are the potential reasons for switching platform. It directly impacts the CRO and SEO.
• Mobile Optimization: As the world is moving mobile, it is highly important that your ecommerce store works smoothly on smartphones, tablets, and other mobiles as well.
• Market Trends: You need to analyze whether the current features and functionalities of your ecommerce store are as per market trends or not. “Multi-channel” buying experience, or integrating “social commerce” is the best epitome.
• Scalable: The platform should be able to meet the current and upcoming market needs.
• Costs: If you are having a small business and are using a platform whose running costs are too high, then it is better to switch to a cheaper alternative.
• Platform Speed: A one-second delay in the loading time can reduce the conversion rate by 7%. Platform speed is critical for your business.

Conversion Rate Audit

The general conversion rate on an ecommerce store lies between 2-5%. Getting more traffic on your site with good marketing efforts is really fruitful when the conversion rate is good else it is also a waste of money. Conversion rate optimization is about maximizing the user percentage to complete the desired action.

As per research, a 20% increase in decision simplification can lead to an 80% probability increase in making a purchase. Some of the other Conversion rate optimization factors are:

• Calls to Action: If the CTA is too big or small, or not clickable, then it will drastically impact the conversion rate. You must put the effort into optimizing the CTA button for a high CR.
• Home Page and Landing Page: If there is a high bounce rate and drop-offs, there can be multiple factors that are driving away your customers. As an ecommerce store owner, you must display “Trust signals” to ensure smooth navigation. Proper linking with the content, products, and pages will improve this.
• Opt-In forms: If the conversation rate is much lower than the expectation, then you must check the opt-in forms to know why. Your site is maybe asking for much unnecessary information or the reward for opting-in is not well sold.
• Product and Category Pages: It is easier to buy products from an ecommerce store. But giving too many choices is jeopardizing.
• User-Onboarding: Don’t force your users to sign-up on your ecommerce store, it can also cause conversion issues. Make the onboarding process as much as simple.
• Checkout: Checkout is also a highly important part of the user experience. Cart abandonment is mostly due to the tedious checkout process. Make sure the checkout is smooth. You can also opt for one-step checkout.

Content Audit

A content audit is required to identify the valuable assets, improve site design, generate more traffic, and even more sales. It helps in:

• Increasing CTR: Improving content on product pages, category pages, home pages, and other content will improve conversion rates.
• Marketing: Content is amongst the best ways of marketing. You can identify the trending topics for the new content campaigns and can rewrite better keyword-optimized content.
• SEO: Content is the first thing while doing the SEO of your ecommerce store.
• Better Site Design: User experience designers also use content audits to inform redesigns or improve navigation.

Tools for content audit of an ecommerce website

• Siteliner
• Google Search Console
• Google Natural Language processing
• Google Analytics

What does an Audit report tell you?

There are many aspects of information that you can get through an audit report. These are:

• SEO: The report would be focused upon compliance of best SEO practices and will help you in getting higher organic traffic with lower customer acquisition cost.
• Performance: Auditing performance under normal circumstances and with more traffic gives you insights into how to reduce bounce rate by slow speed, increase conversions, and provide better performance at even peak traffic.
• UX: You can improve the UX design, and make meaningful user journeys.
• Security: Auditing will help you in finding vulnerabilities, loopholes for cyber attacks, etc.

Wrapping Up

Ecommerce auditing is necessary for you due to multiple reasons. performing site audit and fixing issues will definitely boost up the performance of your ecommerce website. We at Emizentech have expertise in developing successful ecommerce stores and performing advance audits as well. So, let us know your requirements.