3 Painstaking Magento Fails (Over Promised, Under Delivered)

5 facts that you need to know before we get started:

1.  As of January 12, 2015 there are 217,905 Magento stores up and running online.
2.  9,063 of them made it to Alexa’s top one million rank.
3.  The failure rate for businesses in general within the first 10 years of operation is 71%.
4.  With e-commerce, 65% of businesses fail within the first 18 months.
5.  90% of them fail before their 5 year anniversary.

I’m not going to go too deep into the reasons of why they fail, but I will tell you what we’ve seen based on working with a large number of Magento sites.  I can tell you confidently that most of the biggest mistakes boil down to one of 3 issues.

Magento stores fail because:

1.  They don’t get enough traffic.  (SEO / PPC companies not delivering promised results)
2.  They don’t get enough conversions.  (Poor design / unmanned analytics)
3.  They have a poor reputation / competitive position.  (This one should be easy)

You are most likely reading this post because you are intelligent enough to plan ahead and learn from other people’s mistakes so I will not waste your time on going into detail on how to fix these 3 items.  I will, however, share the most successful tools that were used for each issue.

Traffic

Climbing your way to the top of Google isn’t always easy, but content is king.  You may spend a ton of money for PPC (make sure the juice is worth the squeeze).  Get as much quality content out there as you can.  This is no secret, but will you dedicate the time to plan this out in advance?  OK.  Enough of that, you know what to do here.  Check out Moz.com.

Conversions

Are you copywriting your product descriptions well enough?  Are you going after the right buyers?  Is there a problem with your cart / checkout process? Is your check out process properly SSL’ed?  So have a good analytics program installed and study the metrics with an e-commerce expert.  Try using CrazyEgg.com.

Reputation

This is a no brainer.  Take care of your customers and genuinely care about their needs.  Respond to reviews; and if you get a bad one don’t ignore it.  Reviews are constantly being overlooked, so pay attention to them because your customers are.

If you are on this website at this very moment looking to make your Magento store better, then congratulations.  You are probably one of the 10% that are making it work.  You have already figured out a solution to the first 3 issues discussed above.  If you are like the other successful Magento store owners / executives that we talk to, then you are looking for a way to maximize your conversions (turn browsers into paying customers).

Fact:  A One Second Delay In Page Response Can Result In A 7% Reduction In Conversions.

How much money does your Magento store make?  What would happen if your site was just one second faster?  Let’s review a real life Magento store that we’ve worked on and currently hosting.  One of our clients generates about $54,700 in sales per day on average.  They understand how page load time affects conversion rate.  To them, one second equals roughly $1.39 million in sales every year.  Yes.  If their site becomes one second slower, they can potentially lose $1.39 million in sales, if it becomes faster they will generate $1.39 million more in revenue.

The real reason that you are here right now is because you want to maximize your profit margin.  This can be done with eBoundHost using our Magento Community or Enterprise Hosting Platform with JetRails(TM) Pro.  Do you want to see a skeptical person turn into believer?  Visit eboundhost.com/magento and discover what your competitors are learning about.  The only question that remains; are you going to get there before they do?

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Tom P February 17, 2015