Implementation Best Practices: Early Go Live

If you’re new to the world of eCommerce, it can be a daunting place: new concepts to grasp, new processes to understand, and important decisions to make that will ultimately determine your success. That’s why we’ve spent years perfecting our implementation service, to guide you through every step and, crucially, to ensure you maximize your return on investment (ROI).

An area that often confounds retailers is go live readiness. We’ve found customers who rush to go live, with poor quality product data, or insufficient information about the store, and, on the other extreme, those who spend months tirelessly perfecting every detail. Of course, there is a balance to be struck, and timing is everything!

With that in mind, here’s our take, directly from NitroSell’s implementation best practices:

1. Go live early: aim to go live 1-3 months after your staging store activation date. Going live in 1-3 weeks is possible, but isn’t realistic unless you are exceptionally well prepared and have plenty of spare time. Going live any later than 3 months after activation will have a negative effect on your ROI;
2. Be decisive: using competitive analysis and other (basic) marketing techniques, quickly identify and decide on what matters for your webstore — navigation structure, payment gateway(s), domain selection, tax and shipping, e-mail configuration, and the look & feel. Making these choices sooner enables you to focus on the main body of work;
3. Iterate: start with a small percentage of your items and populate the web attributes comprehensively. For instance, if your store has 1,000 products, start with 50, or 100, and perfect the product information, including images, brand, theme, product name (using WebDescription), extended description, pricing and quantity info;
4. Test: once you’ve gone live with your initial set of items, consider spending a little on a pay per click (PPC) ad campaign with AdWords or Microsoft adCenter. Using Google Analytics eCommerce tracking (which works automatically with your webstore), you can quickly and easily identify what’s selling. Armed with that knowledge, add similar products to those that are selling well in your next iteration;
5. Build: the single biggest killer of web sales is neglect. As your webstore’s revenue grows, continue to build on your initial efforts. Schedule some time every week to work on your store and grow your new web business.

That’s it!

As always, questions and comments are welcome! Please feel free to leave a comment below, or to open a ticket on our Partner Portal.