If you are trying to create a successful e-commerce or affiliate marketing business, it is important to see what the most successful brands are doing. When you take a look at large e-commerce sites like Amazon and eBay, you will see a number of things that differentiate them from less successful competitors. One variable that few marketing and e-commerce pundits talk about is the high uptime of these websites.
The average uptime of the 50 most popular websites is 99.03%. This is the equivalent of three full days, plus 15 hours and 39 minutes over the course of a year. These e-commerce giants understand that minimizing website downtime is one of the many keys to maximizing their profitability.
There are a lot of things that you can do to boost your uptime. One is to choose a dedicated server. Find out what you can do with a server, so you can get the best from it.
There are a number of reasons that you need to keep your downtime as low as possible if you are running an e-commerce or affiliate site. Here are some of the biggest.
Maximizing your conversion rates
The average conversion rate for an e-commerce website is around 3%. This figure is expected to fall as more customers use mobile devices to make online purchases, because the mobile e-commerce conversion rate is only around 53% that of desktop conversion rates.
A high website downtime will lead to a much lower conversion rate. If your website downtime rate rises from 0.3% to 20%, then your 3% conversion rate can fall to around 2.4%. This can significantly hurt your cash flow if you are trying to scale your business.
Earn returning customers by providing a good experience
E-commerce companies have always needed to offer a good customer experience to succeed. In 2018, this is more important than ever. A recent report found that 59% of customers will not return to a website after having a bad customer experience.
There are a number of reasons that customers don’t feel they had a good customer experience. Of course, the biggest way to irritate them is by having a website that goes down frequently. They might be willing to forgive you if your website is down the first time that they try to visit. Most people understand that even the most well-maintained websites go down on occasion. However, if your site is down every time that they try to access it, then they will stop trying to ever come back.
If you want to earn loyalty long-term customers for your e-commerce site, then you must make sure that it is accessible as often as possible. This is arguably even more important for affiliate websites, because they depend on returning customers even more.
You get a better ROI with your AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns
Many e-commerce websites initially depend on organic traffic. They use SEO, Pinterest and Facebook groups to attract their audience. This can be a good way to earn customers initially, but if you want to scale your business long-term then you are probably going to need to depend on advertisements.
Although digital ads are very helpful for drawing more traffic to your website, they also cost money. If you aren’t optimizing your sales funnel well, then you are going to lose a lot of money. A high website downtime can hurt your e-commerce funnel in several ways:
- You are paying for clicks to your website even though your users won’t be able to convert (since your website is down and your landing pages aren’t visible to your visitors)
- Your quality score will suffer, which will mean that your ads won’t get as much visibility and your CPC may be higher
- You risk having your accounts get banned for a poor user experience (this is rare but is possible if your downtime is very high)
You need to make sure that your website has a high uptime rate before creating a digital advertising strategy.
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