Eight ideas to keep your ecommerce site fresh
	Gareth Sales Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Hi everyone,

If you want your ecommerce site to fulfill its potential it’s important to keep your store fresh and up to date. Your content, products, and promotions all need to be regularly maintained while it’s also a good idea to refresh your navigation, themes, and other design elements every now and again.

If you don’t keep your content fresh you could be missing out on sales, especially during seasonal periods such as Easter, Father ’s Day etc. Even worse, if your customers keep seeing the same products & banners over and over again they may decide to go elsewhere for new ideas.

Here are eight tips to keep your store fresh

Schedule a weekly site clean-up
Set aside an hour each week to go through your home page, category pages, shopping cart and any other parts of your store with changeable content and ensure old promotions and seasonal content are cleared out. Make sure there are no missing images. Monitor customer product reviews to make sure postings are appropriate. Make sure you don’t have featured products that are out of stock.

Keep your promotions fresh
If you have sale items in your featured products, rotate them regularly. Sale pages are where most visitors will visit first so make sure you rotate the content to stop them from getting bored. You can then cross sell your regular products from your sale pages.

Monitor competitors
Find your top five or ten competitors and review their stores weekly. You may find one offering 50% off your best selling products. You don’t have to match the offer, but at least be aware of it for future promotions.

Promote new products
Shoppers love new products. Make sure you launch new products and tell your customers about them. Create a ‘New Products’ category, move new items to the top of your product listings, write a blog post about them and post links on your social media profiles.

Play around with different navigations
Do you use analytics to see how people are interacting with your website? If you have categories that are not getting attention, try setting up an easier path. Likewise, if people are not using a link / button, remove it and try a new one.

Change your template
VP-ASP has over 30 professional ecommerce templates to choose from and we often release new ones. You can buy them for just $95 or get one free when you switch to VP-Cart Business Ready. You can then announce your store’s new look in your monthly newsletter to attract customers to your site.

Keep an eye on stock
If you have lots of items out of stock, hide a few, a store with hardly any items in stock looks bad. If you have a few best-selling items out of stock for a few days then it’s fine to leave them in with an "out of stock” message.

Post fresh content
If you run a blog on your store or have presence on Twitter & Facebook, ensure you add new content regularly, not only is this good for SEO, but it makes your business look active. Make sure you monitor posts customers and respond to them quickly.

I hope you find these tips helpful.

Happy Selling!

Gareth
VP-Cart