Managing a Live Shop

In our previous series, we covered how to manage the process of building an online shop. If you haven’t read that already, you can do so here.

In this article, we’ll discuss how, as a merchant, you can handle the challenges of managing your online shop.

As an eCommerce manager, among your responsibilities, you’ll handle the following:

• making sure your shop operates well
• empowering your team and identify opportunities for optimization
• develop new features

Running your shop

You launched your shop, but performance issues or bugs can creep in with new features added over time, with peaks in traffic or other changes to external components. Consequently, you need to monitor how your shop is running and make sure it performs well continuously.

The first thing to monitor is the uptime of your shop. You can use services like StatusCake or UptimeRobot that open your shop periodically to check if it is online. Sometimes there are false positives due to issues on the tools’ side, so make sure to double-check the results they show. Having downtimes is not the end of the world, but knowing about them and taking corrective action is paramount before situations escalate.

SEO is also a critical component of any shop, so setting up Google Search Console can alert you to crawl issues on pages in your shop. Noticing and fixing such issues in a few days is recommended for good search engine optimization.

Core Web Vitals (formerly Google Page Speed) can show your shop’s performance, not only as server response time but also as experienced by end-users. Although the score and report can provide valuable insights, don’t obsess about perfect scores because they’re often impossible to achieve. Compare your shop’s performance against your competitors to see how you’re doing.

With ongoing changes, the performance of your shop can degrade. Any marketing widget your team adds to the shop will have an impact on performance. Permanent monitoring can help you identify the changes early on and discuss with your marketing team whether the performance tradeoff is worth the benefit the integration offers.

Empowering your team & constant optimizations

As an eCommerce manager, you’ll help your team work together in operating your shop and be the point-of-contact to your development team.

You’re responsible for making sure the entire team works efficiently in managing the shop. If they have questions or issues, you’ll be the point of contact in answering them, so it can help to have a knowledge base or documentation available, especially when onboarding new staff.

It is also helpful to observe how the team operates the shop to identify opportunities for optimization. Often, people work with software for long enough not to realize how inefficient their day-to-day operations are. You can spot the tasks that take a lot of manual labor and think about ways to automate or simplify them. Discuss these challenges with your development team to find better solutions and make your operations team more efficient.

Develop new features

You will want to develop new features for your shop’s backend to help your team work more efficiently or on its frontend to fulfill customer needs and increase conversions.

For all these new features, you’ll need to work with your development team.

When you want to build a new feature, you will start by writing a requirements document: you will outline the problem you’re trying to solve, the expected business outcome, and optionally the solution you propose to solve the problem. With your external development team, you will explore potential solutions to the business problem. Then, your development team will estimate a budget and, after your approval, proceed with the implementation.

As with the initial development, you and the development team will need to follow the QA and UAT processes to ensure the quality is maintained. You will also review changes to the shop’s performance to make sure it does not degrade.

Finally, after the launch of any feature, you should measure its success: if it is a feature to optimize your team’s performance, calculate the time saved by the new feature; for frontend features, measure their usage and the increase in conversions. Not all features will be winners, but having precise measurements will help you in future decisions.

Conclusions

The work you do as an eCommerce manager impacts your team’s efficiency and the shop’s performance, both large contributors to the company’s bottom line.

Diligently monitor your shop and work together with all stakeholders to find new and innovative solutions for constant and measurable improvements.