18 E-Commerce Spring Cleaning Tips to Increase Sales in 2022

Spring Cleaning Your E-Commerce Site

Springtime is here. Cherry trees are blooming; green is budding on the trees; birds sing. For an e-commerce business, spring can be an exciting time of renewal. So after a little post-holiday-season downtime, it’s time to kick your brand into high gear for the rest of 2022.

It’s time for spring cleaning! But we’re not talking about cleaning out your closets. Instead, it’s time to reorganize and freshen up your eCommerce business. Here are our e-commerce spring cleaning tips for updating and optimizing your online store, so you’re ready for a successful year.

By spring cleaning your e-commerce site, you are optimizing for conversions simultaneously. Adding new functionality, cleaning out old products and pages, fixing broken links, or updating your product photos could be all it takes to convince shoppers to purchase from your store.

With so much at stake, spring cleaning your e-commerce business is the perfect initiative to breathe new life into your store. If you need some ideas on where to begin, here are 18 e-commerce spring cleaning tips to get you started.

18 E-Commerce Spring Cleaning Tips

1 – Revisit Old Content

No matter how great your old content is, the truth is that it will eventually drive less traffic to your store and diminish in value. However, by repurposing your most important content, you can boost your search rankings and increase your traffic.

Now is an excellent time to identify the content that performed best and repurpose it to make it even better. Repurposed content gives those who missed your content the first time a chance to read it, but it also gives you another opportunity to promote your content on different mediums.

Spring cleaning your e-commerce site is also an ideal time to look at your content that didn’t do well. It may be best to get rid of it if it’s beyond saving.

2 – Clear Out Slow Inventory

Which items in your inventory aren’t moving fast enough? Whether they are out of season or just not a hit with your customers, they take up valuable shelf space. It’s time to rebrand, repackage, or liquidate those products.

Often, you can get customers excited to purchase your otherwise unwanted inventory if you offer it as part of a tempting product bundle. Some brands even present a product bundle as a “mystery pack,” filled with assorted slow-moving inventory.

Deep discounts can be desirable to the shopper looking for a great deal if all else fails.

3 – Evaluate Your Core Pages

Core pages such as your About Me page can play a crucial role in assisting customers and convincing them to purchase from you. If it’s been a while since you looked at your FAQ, contact page, and store policies, review and update them.

Your core pages will look different now than when you first launched your e-commerce store. This difference is because you’ve learned more about your company and your customers. You can use this knowledge to make these pages even more powerful.

• About Me page: Is your company vision still the same? Do you need to expand upon your brand vision?
  
• FAQ: What questions have customers asked you about that aren’t currently in the FAQ?
  
• Store policies: Does your privacy policy need updating to comply with changing GDPR? Is your return policy hurting your store? Do your terms of service confuse shoppers? Do they understand your shipping policy?

Get feedback from your customers and find out what needs work.

4 – Check for Broken or Low-Performing Pages

Of course, your products aren’t the only part of this spring cleaning effort. The web pages themselves need a little airing out and touching up. First, perform a website audit to identify the pages that perform poorly. Poor performance means pages that get the least number of visits, pages that load too slowly, and pages that are often the last page a customer sees before they bounce without converting.

Find out what’s gone wrong with each page and either remove it, redirect it, or update it for better conversions and customer experience.

5 – Clear Out Old Files and Unused Pages

You can significantly speed up your site and reduce your server size by clearing out all old files, pages, and data that are no longer needed. Often, unneeded pages remain after a website’s design or update process. Check for old CSS pages, unreferenced image files, and anything else included in your website directory that you can remove.

6 – Update Your Images

Nothing dates your e-commerce site for returning customers quite like images. You might think the same photo for the same product is fine if the product hasn’t changed, but your customers and current trends may have!

Fresh new photos using what you’ve learned from customer feedback or photos that embrace recent trends in design can make each product look shiny and new to return customers.

Create new product images optimized for conversions and build a unique, more compelling style to unify your e-commerce product images and overall website feel.

7 – Improve Your Website Design

Every successful e-commerce business has changed its website’s look over the years. Trends come and go so quickly that this is just another part of being in the online market. The website designs that are popular now are going to look outdated in just a few years.

It doesn’t take much to give your site a completely new look, and you don’t need to make drastic changes overnight to improve the appearance of your store. However, the better you are at keeping up with changing e-commerce user expectations, the easier it will be to make changes as time goes on.

8 – Add New Functionality

E-commerce design is evolving quickly, and you must adapt to emerging e-commerce trends if you want to meet the expectations of demanding mobile consumers. Does your store have live-chat functionality? Does it have a self-help article archive? Does it have a floating navigation bar or parallax scrolling on the landing pages?

There is at least one popular app or widget your online store could use that is currently all-the-rage with your industry customers’ online shopping habits. Now is the time to get the latest tools and apps to improve your site’s functionality and user experience.

9 – Update Your Plugins and Apps

Plugins and apps need to be updated periodically to work efficiently. Unfortunately, some developers stop supporting the plugins and apps altogether, and the outdated technology could be leaving your e-commerce store vulnerable to hacks. On the other hand, others may have released the latest and greatest version to improve your site’s efficiency.

Go through your site, look for updates and consider whether or not they’re still working for you. There may be a better option on the market, like abandoned shopping cart app recovery, that can help you earn more and streamline your processes.

10 – Optimize Your Checkout Process

It makes little sense to spend the time and effort of nudging consumers toward check out to make them jump through hoops once they get there. But on the other hand, it doesn’t take much to scare off your customers from purchase, so optimizing your checkout process is essential.

As you spring clean your site, make sure that you are streamlining your checkout by keeping the following in mind:

• The first step is the most important: The first step during the checkout process is where most visitors decide if they want to continue or abandon their shopping carts. At this step, they are wondering whether it’s worth the effort. So make the first page as easy as possible to keep them on the path to purchase.
• One-step checkout may not always be better: One-step checkouts can be highly effective for e-commerce businesses, but not if you have many forms to fill out on a single page. So don’t abuse the one-step checkout, and make sure that you keep checkout forms limited.
• Use in-line form validation: Save users the hassle of figuring out which line they filled incorrectly and tell them how to fix it. Simply telling users that they made an error is highly annoying, and they will leave if they can’t figure it out quickly.

It may seem like common sense, but it’s surprisingly easy to overlook many obstacles in your checkout process. Removing these obstacles is key to streamlining your checkout process, making the end-user happy, and converting more visitors into valued customers.

11 – Fix Broken Links

Do all your links work? Broken links are annoying for customers and may cause them to leave your site. It can also lower your Google search rankings if internal and external links refer to pages that are either outdated or no longer exist.

You should check each link on a website frequently and regularly to ensure they direct to the correct page. You can use an online tool like Screaming Frog or a plugin like Broken Link Checker to find broken links.

12 – Update Your SEO Descriptions

A product description is more than just something your customers read to find out more before purchasing. Search engine crawlers also read descriptions that decide when and where your page appears for customer searches. Therefore, it’s essential to keep up with current SEO standards and best practices by freshening up those descriptions to catch more SEO top-of-page results.

13 – Clean Up Your Online Store’s Data

Data is the lifeblood of many e-commerce sites. It’s what we use to measure the efficiency of our marketing campaigns and helps us identify where we need to make improvements.

The problem is that even the smaller e-commerce stores manage to accumulate messy piles of data that need regular cleaning. If left unattended, outdated data can seep into your database and wreak havoc on your marketing campaigns.

By cleaning and organizing your store’s online data, you will improve your marketing strategies and reach your customers where they want to be contacted. Start cleaning up your online data by standardizing your data, eliminating duplicates, and using smart forms to improve your lead generation.

14 – Check-in with Your Customers

It’s a common problem to be so close to your business that you no longer see where you could make improvements or what your customers want. Give your audience a voice by asking what types of products they want to see, suggestions for your shop, and how you can make your store better than ever in your spring cleaning journey.

15 – Observe the Competition

Keeping tabs on your competition is helpful to your e-commerce store in many ways. First, if your competitors are savvy, they have made critical changes to their stores over the years to meet the changing demands of customers.

As you spring clean your e-commerce site, now is an excellent time to look at your competition and see how you stack up. Competitors’ changes could indicate a strategy to advertise to a new market that you haven’t noticed yet. Now you can alter your site to appeal to this new audience and potentially steal some of your market share.

Has your biggest industry rival changed their prices? Online shoppers are always on the hunt for a better deal, and you may have to adjust your prices and offer better discounts to remain competitive. By being aware of your competitor’s strategies, you can use them to make your own decisions to improve your site’s performance.

16 – Switch Up Your Promotions

Every online shopper loves a good deal. However, they don’t love seeing the same lackluster value every time they visit your site. If your sales and promotions are always the same, you aren’t instilling FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) in your customers.

So how do you switch things up to keep them coming back for more? Here are a few tactics that you can use:

• Personalize your offers: Everyone likes to feel special. Discounts can increase your sales on their own, but personalizing your offers can be even more effective.
  
• Use any opportunity to offer a special deal: The change of seasons, an upcoming event, the anniversary of your e-commerce store’s opening—there is always something you can use as an excuse to offer new deals for your customers. Just make sure that the offer isn’t the same every time!
  
• Offer discounts in exchange for reviews: Not only does your loyal customer get a discount for their next purchase, but you also get a customer review that can help increase your sales. It’s a win-win situation.
  
• Include discounts in your emails: An effective method of getting more people to sign up for your email newsletter is by having special offers and discounts inside them. Reward your subscribers by giving them deals that they can only get by opening your emails. You can then use your growing number of subscribers to tease new products and promotions, giving them further incentive to read your newsletter.

17 – Refresh Your Search and Display Ad Copy

When it comes to your pay-per-click campaigns, you probably spend most of your time thinking about your targeting and bidding strategies. However, these strategies don’t count for much if your PPC ad copy needs work.

Even if your PPC ads are doing fine right now, you will eventually need to refresh them to remain competitive. The more relevant your ad copy is, the more success you will have with your PPC ads.

Take the time to create compelling ad copy that appeals to your target audience, and keep refreshing them. That way, you can improve the quality of your ads and see a greater return on your ad spend.

And although it’s almost a given that you’re testing your ad copy, the importance of testing your PPC ads needs to be stated. Trying ad variations is an easy way to improve your PPC campaign performance and drive more significant amounts of high-quality traffic to your e-commerce site. So take advantage of A/B testing tools and figure out which ad variations work best!

18 – Start Your Holiday Calendar

Finally, spring cleaning your e-commerce site is the perfect time to plan for the year’s holiday events and sales. Is your brand doing something for Boy’s Day, Mother’s Day, or Father’s Day? Do you have a sale planned for Golden Week, the 4th of July, Back-to-School, or Halloween? Now is the time to prepare.

You might even find a few obscure holidays worth promoting for your brand, like Talk Like a Pirate Day. Also, if you ship your products internationally, include any international holidays worth adding to your calendar for an even more eventful marketing calendar this year.

Spring Cleaning Your E-Commerce Business

Although it can be challenging to find the time to give your e-commerce site a thorough spring cleaning, you must make room in your busy schedule for this routine checkup. 

Now is the perfect time to freshen your inventory, website content, and structure of your e-commerce site itself. As the weather warms up and your customers look forward to a better summer, ensure your e-commerce website is ready to provide the best possible customer experience.

Outdated content, underperforming images, and old promotions can cause a massive decline in lead generation and sales. By utilizing these tips, you can identify and fix the issues holding your e-commerce store back from experiencing increased traffic and conversions. We are here to help!

Do You Need to Spring Clean Your E-Commerce Site?

Do you want to improve your e-commerce user experience and increase sales in 2022? Our team of professional designers will be happy to help you with this. But, first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your e-commerce web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

And if you are still not sure how to decide which of these emerging mobile commerce trends you should implement, let’s talk. We will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine the best e-commerce solutions for your company or product brand!

Did You Do E-Commerce Spring Cleaning?

Do you have anything to add to our e-commerce spring cleaning tips? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed, so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

Thank you! We appreciate your help to end bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita