Why Are Some E-Commerce Business Owners Afraid To Spend Money On Their Website?

In all my years in the web design, development, SEO, and website management space, I have noticed that you begin to see trends, personality traits, and predictable behavior associated with various business types.

One of the most baffling characteristics I have realized is that new and medium-sized (some significant) e-commerce businesses have a hard time justifying the investment into their website.

The Instant E-Commerce Culture Of Today

Back in the early days, if you wanted to get involved in a legitimate e-commerce business, you were required to consider some serious web development to establish your website configuration.

That is just not the case anymore.

Platforms like Shopify and even WordPress with a custom Woocommerce integration condition your expectations for cheap and quick results.

All of this is entirely understandable, but this low-spend mindset perception is not valid. Even if you feel your website looks fantastic, I guarantee you are missing out on some tactical measures that can, without a doubt, increase the efficiency of your sales conversions, whether this is in a design sense, SEO, or development sense.

Your e-commerce business is 100% reliant on your website’s performance, and your budget allocation should fully support the efficiency and optimization of your website before allocating high costs for general advertising, bells and whistles, and most importantly, PPC efforts.

How About A Practical Example?

I recently had an e-commerce customer on-board with my company for monthly website management and professional consultation.

Their WordPress and Woocommerce integration was a mess, riddled with functionality issues, and needed intervention to work correctly. This customer was eager and willing to justify the expenditure of fixing their website, bringing it back to its normal, functional state, and soon after requested advice on improving traffic and sales moving forward.

This e-commerce business contained just shy of 50 products. It was acquiring roughly 2k unique visitors per month and averaging approximately $12k per month in sales, an extraordinary conversion ratio — this traffic and sales trend was consistent for over 12 months.

I engaged in an audit of the website and determined that the website contained zero on-page, targeted search engine optimization associated with the product listings. I consulted with the business owner sharing my findings, and detailed a six-month on-page SEO initiative that I was confident would X2 the website traffic, subsequently doubling the sales due to its consistent history of sales conversion ratios.

The cost of this recommended six-month on-page SEO initiative totaled approximately $6k. After six months, the e-commerce website sales based on historical data would increase from the $12k monthly range to the $24k monthly range, give or take.

In this case, and like many other e-commerce business owners, this customer decided that they would instead allocate their extra budget towards Adwords.

Final Point

An e-commerce website is a living, breathing machine. The entire purpose of the website is centric around achieving sales and generating profit for you. Your budget and any costs associated with your website will yield a better ROI when realizing the long-game will save you in the long-run.

Do not underestimate the ability to be strategic for the long-term to justify costs.

Mike Danna — Lead Developer, Vessio.com