Best Practices from Big Brands for Keeping Your Digital Ecommerce Shelf Up to Date

Keeping up with your ecommerce sales has become essential for staying successful in today’s business environment. Global ecommerce sales reached $2.290 trillion last year and continue to expand, on track to reach $4.479 trillion by 2021, eMarketer projects. By that time, ecommerce sales will make up 16.1 percent of total sales.

For business leaders, the growth of ecommerce sales represents challenges as well as opportunity. One challenge is keeping your ecommerce sales pages maintained, which represents challenges similar to those involved in managing physical inventory.

Here are three proven strategies you can borrow from successful brands to keep your ecommerce shelf up to date.

Manage Your Pages from a Central Platform

One of the challenges growing ecommerce brands face is the sheer task of managing product pages. In addition, each product may be featured not only on your own website, but also on multiple retailers across the internet and social media. Keeping all these pages updated and optimized can be an enormous, time-consuming task.

To make this task manageable, large brands such as Mattel use ecommerce content management system (CMS) platforms that enable them to manage all their pages from a central interface. This type of interface can integrate with your inventory system so that each product page can be managed by SKU number. Additionally, CMS interfaces may provide analytics for other vital product page data, such as on-page optimization factors and review scores. Employing this type of platform enormously simplifies the task of maintaining product pages for a large number of products and venues, and also helps streamline SEO.

Optimize Your On-Page Product Descriptions

A CMS platform also makes it easier for you to optimize your product pages to keep you positioned in search engine rankings. Effective ecommerce SEO requires ongoing maintenance to keep your keywords and images current with the latest marketing trends. A keyword that may have been trending last quarter may have dropped in volume this quarter, requiring you to update your on-page SEO. The easiest way to do this is to deploy a CMS platform.

On-page elements that need to be optimized include textual elements such as page titles, product description copy, and product feature and benefit bullets. Optimization also needs to encompass visual and audio elements such as images and rich media. In addition, your product pages should be kept current with the latest reviews from your customers. Ecommerce product optimization CMS platform Content Analytics provides a whitepaper you can download for detailed best practices on optimizing each of these elements.

Track Your Results

To make sure your optimization efforts are effective, it’s vital to track your product pages’ performance. This can allow you to see what adjustments are working and what are not. Some CMS platforms include built-in analytics tools to help you review your optimization results. Additionally, tools such as Google Analytics can help you track your results.

For best results, you can split-test different versions of your product pages to see which one performs best. For instance, you may find that a certain title generates more traffic than another, or that one image results in more conversions than another.

Managing your pages from a central platform, optimizing your on-page product descriptions, and tracking your results are three keys to effectively keeping your digital shelves up-to-date. Following these guidelines can save you time managing your pages, boost your conversion rates, and maximize your revenue.