Upgrading Your Website: 10 Tips for Replatforming Your E-Commerce Site

7. Don't neglect search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is one of the strongest drivers of consumers to your website. It's important to preserve what was working on your old site, but leverage the flexible merchandising capabilities and business tools of your new platform to optimize your keywords for various promotions throughout the year.

Calendars.com replatformed last year and has executed SEO very well. A great portion of the company's business is centered on "Flip Day," better known as Dec. 1. To deliver continued sales growth and capture every browser possible, Calendars.com optimized the short buying window of when consumers flip their calendars to the final month and realize they need a new one. A component of this success is the ability to rank highly on the list of search results for an increasing set of keywords and an increasing number of searchers.

The key to Calendars.com's replatforming was leveraging and preserving all the SEO best practices it had already implemented and then expanding those tactics with the new SEO optimization technology available. For example, Calendars.com leveraged SEO keyword capabilities to make sure key product terms like "Pittsburgh Steelers calendar" or "Boston Terriers calendar" were highly ranked and optimally indexed by the search bots for Google, Bing and others. It then ensured that searchers were delivered directly to the specific calendar page they searched for to speed up the purchase process. The results show that Calendars.com is able to drive more traffic to its site and capture highly targeted short-term buyers in its marketplace.

Go Live
8. Test, retest then test again. There's nothing more important than testing your e-commerce site before it goes live. Performance testing is a multilayered endeavor, and you should go through the "test, analyze, fix" cycle several times before launching. If you experience stability or performance problems, work with your e-commerce provider to pinpoint the problem and find a solution. Expand your testing beyond QA personnel to employees or beta groups. Your testing should also extend to mobile devices. If your site isn't optimized for a variety of mobile browsers, you're missing out on potential business.

9. Determine your new organizational structure. Before you launch, sit down with your project team to determine who'll be using the tools and who'll be a part of the core project team. Think about the different components of your e-commerce site — e.g., customer service, analytics, merchandising, etc. — and make appropriate leadership and team changes.

10. Determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) before relaunching. KPIs allow you to measure how effectively your e-commerce site is performing against your business objectives. KPIs vary from business to business and industry to industry, but below are six key KPIs to include in your measurement process:

1. average order value;
2. shopping cart abandon-
ment rate;
3. buying sessions;
4. order conversion rate;
5. new vs. returning visitor percentage; and
6. items per order.

By measuring these KPIs on a month-over-month and year-over-year basis, you can track your overall e-commerce health and identify areas that need 
more attention.

Remember, once you successfully launch your site, the site manager and his or her team needs to manage it responsively and proactively. The best e-commerce sites are ones that are fine-tuned over time and evolve with the landscape of the fast-paced e-commerce market.

Robert Gilbreath is the director of e-commerce marketing and analytics for online calendar store Calendars.com. Robert can be reached at rgilbreath@calendars.com. Bill Zujewski is vice president of product marketing for e-commerce platform and application solution provider ATG Commerce. Bill can be reached at wzujewski@atg.com.