The following is the 5 steps program to a stable and healthy commerce website. The following steps will show how to secure and log users actions on the website. Logging the failures and errors will allow identifying the frequently encountered bugs. Next reviewing and improving key areas of the website will create a user friendly, powerful, professional and fast website. The improvements will focus on search, checkout, user registration and user self-service applications. After the program is complete the company will increase sales, reliability and no emergency phone calls on the holidays.
Step 1) Secure your website and set up logging to record failures
Every website has the possibility of a data breach or hack. It is important to audit your website and identify any security issues as soon as possible. You do not want to have a data breach and find out you forgot to lock the doors. The company leadership will lose trust in your ability. Go to and read how to secure your website.
The challenge with websites vs a physical store is a online user shopping experience provides no feedback unless you have the infrastructure to record and audit the shopping experience. In the past, I have found the Dynatrace product to provide the best out of box support with minimal customization. With Dynatrace setup you can get an average user experience score for each session. The session score is based on how fast the website displays with the goal of less than a second and any request that generates errors in the logs or returns failed web service. At a high level, this is the best method without customizations to quickly identify failures.
Step 2) Log and triage major bugs
Once the website is secure and logging has been set up it is important to triage the bugs. If you have an abusive commerce website with a lot of failures you need to look at the bugs that impact the most users and focus on improving the user experience. During this time it is import to record all the bugs and triage the bugs. Not all bugs are created equal and some bugs impact more users than other bugs. Work smart and efficient when dealing with a unstable website.
Step 3) Audit and resolve your search page
If your company sells more than 5 products it is important to have an outstanding search page. The search page needs to be fast, accurate and relevant. Search results need to be returned and displayed to the user in less than a second. The results returned need to be accurate for the specific user. Display accurate information on inventory availability and user-friendly marketing content. You need to be selective with what data you display. Less results displayed is better when dealing with search. Search results need to be relevant for the specific users. Display the customer specific price and support sorting by the customer specific price. The search page needs to be accurate and relevant using high value data.
Step 4) Audit and resolve your checkout flow
The checkout flow is a very import part of the commerce website. The checkout process allows to order and pay for the company products and service. Companies expect the checkout process to be reliable, fault tolerant and quick. The checkout process needs to be developed on a stable platform with a overall architecture. Frequently checkout process is built from a ad how approach. This causes the checkout process to have frequent failures. Each failure experienced is going to reduce the revenue due to lost sales.
Step 5) Audit and resolve your user registration, login process and my account
The ability to create user account and user register needs to be 100% reliable process with no depenedency on the back end systems. The process needs to be fault taulerant and accurate. The process needs to be as simple as quick as possible. Each additional page you add to a registration will cause 10% to abandon the process.
After completing the program you will have a healthy and stable website. Your website will track and notify when online shopper have failures. The search and checkout experience will be simple, accurate and quick. Your companies revenue will increase due to reliable website and increased sales.