Ecommerce Website Rating Tool

E-Commerce really does make a difference to your bottom line

Having said that, near-universal adoption of E-Commerce is making it harder for businesses to stand out. This has shifted the emphasis away from merely having an E-Commerce web design and places greater importance on the quality and accessibility of your website design. 

To help you analyse the effectiveness of your E-Commerce web design Shopify have now released their free Store Grader tool. This enables you to ‘grade’ the quality of your E-Commerce website using 4 simple criteria: SEO, Usability, Content and Social Marketing and Site Performance. The Store Grader will then give you a report which will help you to identify if there are any areas of your website that could be improved.

We like the look of the Store Grader. It’s certainly a further expression of Shopify’s intention to make E-Commerce website design as accessible as possible for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It’s easy-to-use and delivers the kind of precise, helpful feedback that will help you make the most of your E-Commerce store.

It also helps businesses to understand 4 key areas that make up an effective E-Commerce store. Here’s a brief explanation of why they’ve identified these 4 particular areas:

1. SEO

Search Engine Optimization is essential for E-Commerce businesses because it encompasses the relationship between your website and search engines. If you want to attract traffic to your website – ie potential customers – then an effective SEO strategy is vital. This element of the report will help you fix areas of your website which are SEO-deficient and failing to attract search engine traffic.

2. Usability

This is an often underrated aspect of an effective E-Commerce web design. If the website is hard to use or fails to deliver the kind of user experience that customers are looking for then you will lose sales. Keeping things simple and intuitive will make a huge difference.

3. Content and Social Marketing

An effective E-Commerce store will address both on-site and off-site content marketing. It’s crucial that your content is good – from ‘about us’ to product descriptions and terms of service – and that it engages readers. If you’re connecting with an audience via social media then this will help you to signpost more people to your online store.

4. Site Performance

The speed of your website will often have a direct bearing on whether a customer buys your products or not. 79% of shoppers who experience problems with site performance won’t return to the website. 47% expect a load time of 2 seconds or less, and 40% will leave an E-Commerce website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds. These are fine margins, but have a massive impact on sales.

Why not check out the Store Grader today and see how your E-Commerce website is performing.