Launching a new retail website: what to do (and what not to do)

With more than 11% of all sales now made online, retailers large and small are investing in state-of-the-art websites or migrating to new platforms. Switching to a new website or platform is one of the biggest capital outlays any modern retailer can face; it can also be a substantial investment in time and management resources.

With such high stakes come high expectations: for bigger sales and improved efficiency, both internally and for user. All too often, however, the journey is fraught with challenges and headaches and the launch rarely goes according to plan – in some cases, it can mean a decline in sales and brand loyalty.

As we saw recently in the case of Marks & Spencer, this can have a major impact on business. The retail giant upgraded to a new website in February 2014 and online sales fell 8.1% in the 13 weeks to 28 June – that's in a climate where web sales are rising at a rate of 15.1%, according to the Office of National Statistics (pdf).

To uncover the extent of the kinds of problem experienced by M&S, we carried out research among managers with first-hand experience of switching to a new site or platform earlier this year. We found that more than half (55%) of respondents had experienced problems and more than a third (37%) said that these problems had resulted in a loss of revenue or sales. Other problems we uncovered included disgruntled visitors and management time wasted.

Respondents cited a number of reasons why problems occurred when they switched to a new website. We classified these into five different key areas. Below are typical comments made by respondents relating to each type of problem:

Underqualified or inexperienced project team members
"A manager with no development experience made business decisions based on the suggestions of external companies without consulting the existing development team."

Poor communication
"We should have had structured fortnightly meetings with actions and delivery times."

A lack of foresight about requirements when planning the customer navigation journey
"Data architecture wasn't scoped properly."

Poor project management
"We needed stronger project governance."

Inadequate testing
"Poor understanding from the developers resulted in the site going live before it was tested properly."

So how can you protect your online sales by avoiding these kinds of problems and errors? The action you need to take all depends on the stage of development you are at; the strategy, early, middle, final or live stage of the project.

If you are still at the strategy stage, it's worth considering whether you need a new site at all. Optimising your current site can be a much more cost-effective way to bring in more sales. Not sure how well your site is doing currently? Use the following tools to find out:

A conversion funnel to reliably show where visitors are dropping off.
Heatmaps to understand exactly what your visitors click on and what they don't.
A survey to find out why your website visitors and customers don't buy more from your site.

At the early stage of a project, changes to the functional specification can easily be made to ensure that your new website will convert at a higher rate. At this stage, it's also crucial to focus on the needs of your business and your customers and not be overly influenced by the efforts of your competitors.

Once the project has been passed over to designers and developers at the middle stage, it's vital to ensure that the website is optimised to provide the best customer journey and that sufficient thought has been given to the hierarchy of the product categories and sub-categories. New features can look impressive, but how well will they convert visits to sales? Plenty of time should be allowed for user testing of the wireframes and mocked-up pages at this stage of the project as any barriers to conversions identified now will be much easier and cheaper to fix.

At the final stage, there's no more time left to make changes and your main focus should be on setting up some benchmarks in your analytics software so that you are tracking the important measures accurately from day one.

If, despite all your best efforts and planning, your new website has gone live and is not performing as well as your old site, then you can put a conversion disaster recovery plan in place. This involves using a range of tools that enable you to both understand why the new website isn't converting well and split-testing tools that allow you to quickly test your new insight.

Dan Croxen-John is CEO of AWA Digital – download the report mentioned in this article by emailing realresults@awa-digital.com, quoting the Guardian

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