eCommerce and Digital Marketing go hand-in-hand to make a business successful. If you use digital marketing perfectly, your eCommerce can create a big revenue as it helps attract customers and brand value.
Likewise, it’s equally important that your eCommerce platform supports all digital marketing endeavors like social sharing, embed reviews from all channels and more.
Customers are no longer dependent on content and word-of-mouth when it comes to buying products and services. They have learned to read reviews on all the platforms where there is a product listing. A recent analysis has shown that 50% of people are more interested in a brand after seeing an ad on Instagram.
It’s significant to remain visible to your customer or potential customers on all digital channels as customers get distracted easily and you need to grab their attention. That’s where digital marketing comes into play. Digital marketing helps eCommerce businesses succeed at such challenges.
If you are planning to migrate your eCommerce platform, here are the digital marketing factors you should consider
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a blessing in disguise. It’s the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
When a prospective customer uses a search engine to look for information about a product or service, you want to have a higher ranking in search results. This helps increase your opportunities of converting them into customers.
SEO considerations include
When thinking about the right commerce platform for your business, attracting potential leads to your website, using digital marketing, is one thing. The other factor is how is this commerce platform going to let you do that.
Here are some SEO features to look for:
When looking for the right platform, do you have the ability to edit title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and header tags? You may need to make certain edits on your product page, home page, collection pages and other customizable pages.
Title tags and meta descriptions play an important role in strategically adding in your business’ targeted keywords and they function as your call to action (CTA). This entices the searchers to check your listing above competing listings.
URL is one of the most important components of any page for SEO purposes. It tells the search engine what the page is about and it’s the path through which the search engine finds that page.
An SEO-friendly ecommerce platform is one that gives you the ability to easily edit URL strings and rearrange their structure. What is an added advantage is if the platform offers the option of 301 redirecting (from old to the new URL).
It’s not just desktop users you have to think about. It’s important to also consider customers who are accessing your website through a mobile device. A good commerce platform should give you the option of optimizing your website for a mobile device.
Whether that’s through an app that creates a mobile store or by using a responsive design, where a website changes its size and shape depending on the display of the screen.
Most ecommerce platforms offer website visitors the option to conduct an internal search. This means that users can search for items/categories they may not have run into while browning the online store.
Internal search results pages are powerful tools. You can leverage your SEO strategy because they contain information based on what your user searches.
It’s crucial to maintain a relationship with the support team at the platform of your choosing. This ensures that your online store complies with these SEO features. Each ecommerce platform has their own uniqueness and even professionals may require the assistance of the technical team.
The assistance helps your platform to make customizations or to properly set up the online store. The last thing you want for your online store is to not appear on the results page once it’s up and running.
It’s important to think about whether the platform can grow with you. How much traffic do you expect on your site? If you’re just starting out, you might not need a host with high-traffic capabilities. However, if you’re focused on growth, your ecommerce business should grow rapidly.
Will your platform be able to handle the traffic demands now and in the future?
What would happen to your platform if you ran a promotion that goes viral? Your choice of platform infrastructure needs to have the flexibility to handle the traffic surges without crashing your site.
2020 was one of the biggest turning points for businesses. You know why. COVID. One of the biggest changes is that there were new types of customers who were using e-commerce capabilities and buying new products that they’ve never purchased online before.
The new way of purchasing changed the experience and expectations of those customers. If you were a business that sold certain items that one demographic doesn’t buy, the experience on your platform needs to change because your platform had a certain design that was for a different set of customers.
If the technology and business align, look for a platform that allows you to grow and change those experiences when unfortunate experiences happen. We’re not talking about just COVID, there’s other unfortunate events within the market and business. These unforeseen events create demand changes for customers and their expectations.
Pick a platform with a roadmap that aligns with your business, technology and is constantly creating new features, workflows and enhancements. This allows you to extend that platform to meet and surpass the ever-changing customer expectations. You need to keep up with the changing customer expectations otherwise your competitors will take up on the opportunity and take your customers from you.
You also want to start looking at your key performance indicators (KPI). The best way to describe KPI is school grades. If you get an A+, that’s a key performance indicator of how well you knew the information.
However, getting a D means you didn’t know the information that well. Within ecommerce, there’s a lot of key performance indicators that you can leverage to determine success.
Will the platform you choose meet or exceed certain KPIs from day one?
What other KPIs do you need to build if you upgrade the platform?
You have to remember that a website exists for different reasons. Generally speaking, a website attracts, engages and converts customers.
If you’re making a platform change you will see some short-term loss in organic search traffic. What you can do is prepare for it and keep that in mind. What you could do until your ecommerce platform goes back to where you were, invest a little more money into paid media. This can keep your customer acquisition rates at the level you want them to be.
Knowing the cost of hosting an ecommerce store helps you anticipate your spending and estimate your ROI. Some ecommerce platforms offer plans that include a number of features:
Running an ecommerce site requires maintenance, security and other feature upgrades. If you didn’t do proper research before the site launch, you’re looking at a costly transaction.
What is the platform cost, implementation fees and the licensing? Look at other areas that could negatively affect you by not taking into account the right steps.
This aligns with return on investment and how the platform can drive more revenue. How can you create a better customer experience?
How can you set the foundation for the future of your business, the success for you, your employees and for the customers who are shopping on your platform?
Make sure you fully understand the total cost of what you’re looking to achieve.
Running a business itself is difficult, especially when you want to run an online store.
You want to make sure that the platform you choose meets with your businesses’ expectations, there is room for growth, there are ways to measure the KPIs and that it can adjust abrupt change.
There are many different platforms like Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce that can provide you with certain benefits that you’re looking for.
ioVista – a Digital Commerce Agency powering B2B and B2C brands since 2004 is a Magento solutions partner, BigCommerce and Shopify partner. For more than 17 years, we’ve been developing eCommerce websites on all the top platforms– Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Yahoo Stores, and WordPress.
Connect with an eCommerce specialist at ioVista to learn how we can help create an exceptional shopping experience that drives sales and delivers real business results.
Mike Patel is the Founder and CEO of ioVista, a leading digital commerce agency specializing in eCommerce solutions. With a strong background in business and technology, Mike Patel has been at the forefront of driving digital transformations for businesses. He has successfully navigated the ever-changing landscape of eCommerce, helping companies leverage the power of online platforms to grow their brand, increase revenues, and optimize their digital presence. Under his leadership, ioVista has become a trusted partner with major technology companies: Adobe/Magento, Google, BigCommerce, Shopify, and Yahoo. He is dedicated to staying ahead of industry trends, adopting cutting-edge technologies, and continuously improving strategies to provide clients with a competitive edge. Mike’s commitment to excellence and client satisfaction is evident in every project ioVista undertakes.
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ioVista
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to
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