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It’s an age old expression, but somehow it’s the last thing on most marketer’s minds when they think about their ecommerce site and consider upgrading their solution.  I’m fortunate to meet and talk to many ecommerce marketers and merchandisers at trade shows, conferences and during our own sales meetings.  I’m often struck by how many of these marketers (including those working for some of the most respected brands in their industry) forget about walking first when it comes to their own ecommerce solutions. 

There’s no doubt that advanced personalization and recommendation solutions can increase the ROI of an ecommerce site – there’s countless statistics from countless analysts and vendors to support that fact.  But at the same time, when you think about your own ecommerce solution and your plans for it, are these advanced capabilities on your mind, or do you think about the basics – do the nuts and bolts of order processing and shopping work well on your site?  Is it easy for buyers to find the products and services their looking for? 

One company I met with recently is a major world leader in wireless cellular phones and PDA’s.  They’re looking to upgrade their ecommerce site and again, personalization was top of their mind as criteria for selecting a new platform.  But when we looked at their current site, the basics were just not there.  Site layout and design was awkward, product categories were hard to navigate to from their non-commerce information pages and doing simple searches often yielded irrelevant results.  “Battery”, for example, would turn up no results at all (and that’s the most wanted accessory product they sell on their site!).

Clearly this marketer would be better served focusing on the basics and walking first. I guarantee focusing on making sure their site performs well, that the onsite search returns relevant results and that they have good SEO compatibility and have high ranking for natural search on the leading search engines first will do more to increase conversion rate and increase sales than adding a multi-variant near-neighbor recommendation engine ever will.

So the next time you think about your ecommerce site and platform, ask yourself if you’re ready to start running, or should you revisit the basics.

Posted at 07:39 AM in eCommerce Strategy | Permalink