Tips for Successful Ecommerce Website Maintenance

Ecommerce websites have boomed in the last five years. Thanks to COVID-19, we no longer buy and sell as we used to. The move to digital has already happened, and most businesses have an eCommerce website or are thinking about getting one. However, eCommerce websites are challenging to manage and maintain, and they are often incredibly complex and nuanced. If you currently have an eCommerce website, you might struggle to find suitable eCommerce website maintenance services or adequate eCommerce software. This article will break down why you should be looking into eCommerce software maintenance and how you can get the most out of your eCommerce website.

What is the status of eCommerce in 2023?

As someone who has recently gotten into eCommerce or is looking to get involved, it’s a good time to take advantage of the boom that eCommerce is currently going through. During COVID In May 2020, online store spending was up by 77% on previous years. According to a report by Michael Keenan, an executive at Shopify, the e-commerce market share is projected to increase by 2 percentage points in 2023, from 17.8% two years ago to 20.8%. It is estimated that more than 265 million consumers in the United States will be shopping online by that time.

So if you have not set up your eCommerce site, now is the time to get started.

We understand that eCommerce is often not just a website

With so much at stake for businesses’ eCommerce websites, you must have a service that feels the same sense of urgency you do when things go wrong. Ecommerce software is usually quite complex, and like any complicated software, it tends to accumulate bugs and needs maintenance. If your website starts to get heavy traffic, it can be a make-or-break moment for your website to handle all the users interacting with it. When you have a service that actively maintains the health and safety of your website, you can prevent any crashes or bugs that might occur on big sales days.

It is also essential to have a service that understands you want more than just eCommerce added to your website. In most cases, a user buying a product on your site is far from the end. The user enters your customer database, can participate in automated discount processes, be included in your mailing list, etc. It’s not just about buying. Sites like educational institutes aren’t simply shops where people add a shopping cart to their website and check out. They go through an entire business model that other specialized software helps curate, so your client has a great online experience on your site. The problem is that not all support companies are interested in supporting your business structure. Very often, companies specialize only in basic website support. When you sign up for a service to help your website, they must work with your business as a whole and support the overall structure, not just your website’s shop.

Here at Grid Concepts, we understand that a commercial site is more than just a site. We are a service that works with your business in general as opposed to just your business website.

The Benefits of Ecommerce Website Maintenance

There are a lot of benefits to having website maintenance. Here are just a few outlined below.

1. Holistic: As mentioned above, it is vital to keep your website nicely tuned in case of high-traffic incidents that could potentially crash it.
2. Reduced cart abandonment: People often leave a website without completing their purchase. Through a service that maintains your store, you can have a courtesy follow-up for people who left their carts full before they checked out. This can help increase sales and customer retention.
3. Better user experience: If you have a seamless website that is intuitive and well-kept, customers can easily find what they are looking for and are more likely to come back if it was a pleasant experience.
4. Storefront maintenance: Much like an actual physical store, your online store needs to be clean and well-kept. Obvious faults on the website can become frustrating for customers, so it is important to have system checks frequently.
5. Website security: Online security is critical in this day and age. Understanding what security vulnerabilities your website has can be a full-time job. This is why it is vital to have someone working on security and maintenance 24/7 to protect your customers and business.
6. Monitoring: One of the most overlooked aspects of website maintenance is that if it is the middle of the night and your website goes down, who will fix that? Monitoring provides around-the-clock support that makes sure your website is always ready no matter the time.
7. Reporting: ECommerce sites come with basic reports, but sometimes that won’t be enough to get the data you want about your clients. Website maintenance services will work with you to connect your goals with your website to ensure you get all the information you need and want to succeed.
8. Content update: Content updates are essential to keeping your website and product relevant in modern times. With more complex tools that help both customers and businesses, it is necessary to stay on top of your content and keep it relevant to your clients.

How much do you need to spend on commerce website maintenance?

Today, businesses spend $35 to $5000 per month on website maintenance.

To understand how much you need to spend specifically, you need to understand the main principle: the business orientation of the support company is more important than its pricing.

Why is the type of support more important than the price? Imagine the situation. You are the owner of a law firm, and after COVID-19, you understand that many clients come through your website. You would like to receive the following information from your website support:

1. Increase client traffic to your website
2. Integrate your website with your CRM
3. Update your website to be comparable with others in your industry

You find the cheapest monthly support package, and this team brings updates on your site’s security, redesign, and general technical support. In doing so, you want to save money. After a while, you come to your support team with a question: “Guys, what about increasing visitors to my site and integrating my site with the CRM?” And you get the answer that this company doesn’t provide such services.

You go to another company that can increase the number of users on your site — but this company doesn’t monitor the safety of its clients’ websites. As a result, you pay little, but two companies at once, and in the end, it turns out to be more expensive.

Modern support services very often deal not only directly with the support of your site but also with another set of services. And depending on the needs of your site and your industry, you need to choose the appropriate support service. You can find more information about calculating your spending on on-site support and what types of support services exist here.

Also, it’s not about how much money, but how much time is required to support your site. Any support service calculates pricing based on time. Suppose you see very cheap yearly website hosting support. In that case, it most likely means that such a service tends to work with only a website hosting service, and their team maintains 100 to 1000 websites that they help with host-only (and other technical support-only services). They may rely on a large number of sites to stay in business and therefore spend less time on them. Hence the low price.

If you have a personal site or a blog site, then this option is beneficial for you. Now imagine the situation of a different type of service focused on more detailed work with clients. This is the principle behind our company at Grid Concepts. Our support service relies on our two large departments — the marketing team and the support team. Many business owners find it beneficial to have specialists under one umbrella who solve both of these problems. Accordingly, we try to make sure that our pricing is affordable for the client with this approach.