5 Most Important Challenges Facing eCommerce

Whether you’re just launching your eCommerce experience or have been in the game for a while, you probably already know how important optimization is.

But is the current state of eCommerce optimization future-proof?

Are A/B tests the best we can do in terms of experimentation? Will any of the strategies employed today be sustainable just a few years from now? These are the important questions we need to ask as 2020 draws closer and thrusts us into an even faster-moving decade of eCommerce innovation.

Here are the 5 most important challenges merchants need to address to stay ahead of the curve in the coming years:

1. Isolated Testing

So you’ve run a few A/B tests on your site and learned some valuable insights…now what? What experiments have your merchant peers run and what have they learned? Is it applicable to your site as well? Testing on an island can be useful but will never match the exponential learning rate of an entire eCommerce optimization community – and the results are speaking for themselves.

2. Experimentation Risk

Every merchant can learn from testing but few can afford to lose revenue in the process. Good news is, there are now better options than A/B that allow you try thousands of site permutations without impacting your bottom line.

3. Static Shopping Experiences

Personalization is key, and consumers demand dynamic shopping experiences that change as quickly as their preferences do. Keeping your site static is more than likely detracting from CR, AOV, and above all, RPV – and the losses will only continue to grow over time.

Something Digital, one of our leading SIs and a fellow member of the Mobile Optimization Initiative, recently shared some insights on the importance of frequent testing and the impact the MOI is having on the merchant community.

4. Lack of Continuous Optimization

One of the biggest mistakes merchants make with experimentation is simply not doing it enough! Running a couple tests is just the beginning, and the mind-boggling number of variables in today’s eCommerce makes optimization a never-ending learning process. What worked yesterday may not work today, and things will only get more complicated as the online customer experience continues to evolve.

5. Mobile Revenue Gap

This is the big one – the mobile commerce dilemma affecting all merchants.  If you don’t already know about the MRG, it’s time to look into just how much it is currently affecting your revenue. There’s a good chance that your mobile experience isn’t up to par with desktop, leaving you with an incredible opportunity to not only dramatically increase revenue, but also get ready for the increasingly mobile eCommerce world – before it’s too late.

About HiConversion

HiConversion is the only Collaborative Customer Experience Optimization (C-CXO) platform that combines embedded analytics, adaptive algorithms, and standardized experiments to maximize the revenue per visit (RPV) of your online store. HiConversion is the official platform of the Mobile Optimization Initiative, a movement by Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, PayPal, and other eCommerce leaders to close the Mobile Revenue Gap.