In the past decade or so, a clear gap has formed between e-commerce giants such as eBay and Amazon and medium and small online businesses who are trying to compete with these brands. This gap just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it seemed like nothing is going to change. But, some new technologies that have developed in the past few years are proving to be a useful asset to small business owners.
These services can help a smaller business become more competitive in the e-commerce market while measuring and identifying the important business metrics. Enabling your e-commerce store to its fullest is something you must do if you want to stay competitive.
Technology development was always one of the key aspects of business. Luckily, most of modern technologies focus and revolve around the internet and this is why small business owners can try to make the most of these technologies to accelerate their performance in the modern online marketplace.
The numbers show that over one in four users who browse a certain website will leave that place if the page needs more than four seconds to load itself. This is an important thing to bear in mind. While you are reading this, there may be dozens of potential customers leaving your website just because of that.
The Speed of Checking Out
Even though most of business owners have a habit of monitoring their overall site speed through some tools, only a few small e-commerce businesses keep track of their checkout speed.
When a potential customer decides to actually buy something from your online store, the whole process from that point up until the purchase should be as easy and quick as possible in order to stop checkout abandonment.
The current rate for checkout abandonment is as high as 67%. This is why you should try to avoid giving a potential costumer additional reasons for leaving your small business checkout.
The Speed Index
A lot of online businesses rely on using tools such as TTFB (time to first byte) to make sure that the performance of their website is up to par.
However, even though this is good for finding search engine result numbers, the time to first byte is not the best way to determine the overall user experience of the site’s speed.
It is very important that the small business owners monitor the average time needed for a customer to engage with their website.
This time is called speed index and it includes things like the time needed for the whole page to load as well as responsiveness. With this tool you will measure site speed more efficiently.
Many studies have confirmed that for each second a person is waiting for a certain site to load, almost seven percent of them will abandon that website. There are many online providers that allow business owners to check their index speed free of charge.
Web Hosting
It is very important that you reduce the possibility for downtime and timeouts to a minimum, and this is a matter every entrepreneur should discuss with their web hosting service provider.
At AltusHost, we always like to focus our on issues like how to increase your traffic and be prepared for it, what controlling we can do when you need a change made to the production servers, estimating the time we need to get your business back to normal operations when an unexpected failure occurs and establishing proper recovery systems that will ensure you won’t lose anything of value.
The communication between a web host and an online business owner is very important, things must be talked over so that both sides can conduct their business to the fullest potential. You must know what you need in order to choose the most suitable hosting package for your business.
Security Measures
Over half of all the security breaches and scams that happened online are focused on e-commerce websites. This is why it is very important to secure all aspects of your website and other online assets such as email, cloud accounts, etc.
Hiring a backup and system recovery service is important to ensure the safety of your valuable data. Install antivirus software and update it regularly because malware and viruses are constantly upgraded and they can easily breach to outdated antiviruses. It is also essential that you constantly update the operating system used by your IT, to provide crucial security solutions.
More than ever, technology is a vital aspect of every business. The good thing is that most of these technological achievements are fairly cheap and available for anyone. Furthermore, as a small or medium business, you won’t need something expensive to fulfil your needs.
Many tools that can help you get useful analytics are free or very cheap, so don’t sleep and make the most of them to optimize your online business performance.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
