A random Google search for the number of ecommerce websites across the world throws up the count as between 12 to 24 million. Of these, only about 110,000 are making a sizeable revenue worth mentioning. While this indicates a phenomenal potential for the growth of ecommerce, it also subtly highlights the fact that the ecommerce websites not extending to their full potential are the ones that have not focused on maintaining their site regularly.
So, what’s there to maintain in an eCommerce development agency, you may wonder. Surely there may have been times when you tried to shop online and were not able to create a login, add items to cart or checkout easily or worse still reach the payment stage and be told the item is not available anymore. As a frustrated shopper, you may have either left nasty reviews or jumped onto a competitor website to get your much-needed stock.If you think of this situation from a business perspective, several such instances can cause revenue loss for your venture. Hence, as an entrepreneur, you cannot take ecommerce site maintenance lightly. Once you start listing all the actions required to ensure integrated ecommerce web solutions, you will be surprised that a significant chunk of your effort will go towards regularly maintaining your ecommerce website once you have built it out.
Need for Regular Ecommerce Website Maintenance
Just like any other aspect of business, ecommerce websites too, always need attention. There’s never a done-and-dusted aspect for an ecommerce website. Considering new search algorithms, new marketing innovations, and most importantly, the changes in customer behavior and choices, it’s a good practice to chalk out weekly, monthly and annual maintenance tasks for your ecommerce website.
Jeff McRitchie, VP of Ecommerce at MyBinding.com, shares his thoughts:
“Risk Aversion / Security: One of the most important reasons for e-commerce entrepreneurs to ensure regular maintenance of their websites is security. Hackers are constantly targeting major ecommerce platforms and actively scanning for vulnerabilities in both core platforms and in third-party extensions. Failure to maintain can result in either a security breach that could result in major downtime or in customer information being stolen. Hosted platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce will take care of some of these security updates. However, it is possible that some of the security updates they push could break features inside the platform resulting in the need for a different type of maintenance. Open source platforms such as Magento require the regular application of patches and updates to extensions. If this type of maintenance is not done, the risk is substantial.