What is Ecommerce Audit Tools? An audit is a very detailed examination of things like financial statements, risk factors, operations, investments, people and markets. A business’s creditors and investment partners (like venture capital firms) often require audits to ensure that the information is accurate and that there’s no fraud or cheating involved. In other words, an audit can protect you from making bad investments.
Ecommerce audit tools is a utility that makes controlling, monitoring and evaluating high volume of ecommerce activities easier and simple. They look for errors, warnings, security holes and any other problem that may cause loss to company. These tools make reviewing e-commerce website easy by analyzing data from multiple sources like Google Analytics, site navigation patterns, sales details, etc.
Ecommerce audit tools are online services for analyzing and forecasting the performance of your ecommerce store or marketplace. As such tools connect with the website hosted at given address and collect data related to product listing, customer experience, traffic sources, brand visibility and so on. Tools then analyze collected data and show suggestions under different categories like product listing optimization, promotion enhancement, ROI tracking and many more.
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.
A simple tool which picks up the page speed issues including identifying page render blocking CSS and Js , image optimisation , and so on
The tool is excellent for diagnosing and correcting problems to speed up your website Take the report generated through the site and prevail upon your developer to improve it
SeoOptimer
For checking meta tags and SEO related parameters
seoptimer.png
Excellent tool for on-page SEO Auditing . Install the Chrome or Firefox extension of Seooptimer and run them through your websites . Page by Page to get simple actionable inputs of your website’s Meta tags , Text to HTML ratio, image attributes , Number of backlinks etc.
Blisk.io
To check your website on various devices for responsive design
blisk.jpg
Blisk is a browser made for developers. However, easy enough to be used by anyone for checking the responsiveness of the site. Blisk browser gives you Desktop as well as the responsive view of your website simulated for numerous devices including Android Phones , iPhone , Tabs etc.
Statcounter
To analyse visitor traffic
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A sort of simpler version of Google Analytics for those who get overwhelmed with Google Analytics data crunching. StatCounter gives you website stats on some critical parameters such as recently visited pages , income traffic , popular pages , traffic distributed by country state city and many more. Its unique feature is its simplicity
Xenu
To check if there are any broken links
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
xenu.png
You will never realise how many 404 (page not found) may be there. Xenu is a fast free tool to identify broken links. Ideally your site should not have even a single 404 link. Run the Xenu and you will realise how many hidden 404 (page not found links show up)
MouseStats
Study user interaction
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Capture user’s screen by screen activities with MouseStats. MouseStats enable you to record visitor’s sessions and interactions with website. It’s like putting a video camera on visitor’s screen. Also get valuable info through heatmaps . Heatmaps will give you info on where and how the website visitor is clicking.
However to enable MouseStats you need to create an account and embed a code snippet within your website. The initial 100 recordings tier is free
GZip Checker
Enabling Gzip on server will considerably speed-up your website
http://checkgzipcompression.com/
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All modern browsers are capable of unzipping the content on receiving zipped files from the server.
Many web developers simply forget to switch on the gzip from apache or Cpanel.To check if Gzip in enabled or not use this tool.
Conclusion
Ecommerce audit is a business activity where you can track down all of the mistakes that are being done in your online store. It has been dividing into two types: regular audit and digital audit. The first type can check the effectiveness of your marketing strategy as well as the operation process while the second type focuses on the existing tools that are being used by your business. Now, let’s know what is ecommerce audit tools with case studies!