Planning cohesive marketing campaigns is never easy. Add the holiday season – one of the busiest, and most competitive, times of the year for eCommerce businesses – and it gets more challenging. You want your brand to get noticed; you want the messaging and timing to be right; and you want shoppers to purchase your product over countless other options.
Amid this chaos, if your eCommerce platform makes it hard to launch campaigns quickly or forces you to water down a creative idea just to fit its limitations, that is frustrating, and a sign that you might be outgrowing your eCommerce platform. Often, the challenge with eCommerce marketing is not your campaign idea or your strategy – it’s the platform you’re running on.
In this post, we will share some of the pain points we hear from eCommerce marketers and how they can usually be traced back to the platform they’re using.
The pain points every eCommerce marketer knows too well.
You need dev support just to set up promos or landing pages
Many eCommerce businesses use legacy platforms or home-grown solutions to support their online store. But, often, these systems are rigid and code-heavy, requiring eCommerce marketers to rely on a developer to launch or test campaigns. This limited control over campaign setup can become a bottleneck that delays campaign launch. If, for instance, you want to launch a flash sale or a time-sensitive creative campaign, you might have to scale back because you are dependent on busy developers.
How it connects to the platform:
Some platforms aren’t built for marketers to make changes without code. If yours doesn’t give you flexible, DIY tools for landing pages, promotions, or merchandising, the platform is compromising your ability to launch a campaign at speed.
Your site crashes (or slows down) when traffic spikes
You could be doing everything right and driving a lot of traffic to your online store through your ads and campaigns during Black Friday or Cyber Monday. But, if your store is not equipped to handle the surge in visitors, that will lead to a drop in conversions. The last thing impatient holiday shoppers want to do is wait around for a slow page to load. If your eCommerce website is sluggish or crashes when traffic spikes, you will likely lose holiday shoppers and revenue.
How it connects to the platform:
Checkout drop-offs are eating into your ad budget
When holiday sales like Black Friday or Cyber Monday are around the corner, many eCommerce brands spend heavily on influencer marketing and other paid advertising to drive sales. And, again, you could do everything right, but if your checkout process is not optimized for conversions, your ad spend efficiency will see a drop.
Holiday shoppers are in a rush, so you want to deliver a checkout that is fast and seamless. Single click checkout and buy now, pay later (BNPL) options are popular with holiday shoppers. Make sure you incorporate these into your own flow, so your online store is ready to support conversions from your ads and other marketing.
How it connects to the platform:
You cannot clearly see which campaigns or channels drive sales
Good marketing strategy requires good data. If you lack the data to attribute sales to the right channel – whether it’s paid social, email, or organic – it makes budget allocation hard to plan. Plus, having to dig through multiple, disconnected systems to see which campaign brought in leads is both tedious and time consuming. Many eCommerce marketers are often operating with limited resources and tight budgets, so you don’t want to be wasting funds on channels or campaigns that won’t yield significant ROI.
How it connects to the platform:
You’re spending more on site maintenance than growth
If you are spending a big part of your time and budget on website maintenance, bug fixes, or patching integrations, that’s a sign that your platform is slowing you down.
How it connects to the platform:
Think your eCommerce store is outgrowing its platform? Find out with our Shopify Fit Audit.
If those pain points hit a little too close to home, you could be outgrowing your eCommerce platform. With the holiday season just around the corner, you want to start preparing your online store ahead of time to capture early shoppers and handle the increase in traffic volume during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and more. For many eCommerce marketers that are struggling with the constraints of their platform, Shopify could be a better fit.
Shopify gives marketers:
- The freedom to launch campaigns without waiting on developers
- Infrastructure that scales during traffic spikes
- A checkout that’s built to convert, with Shop Pay, Apple Pay, BNPL, and more
- Clear, connected reporting so you know which campaigns drive sales
- A system that streamlines maintenance
In short: Shopify removes the roadblocks that can hinder good marketing.
That’s why, we are offering a complimentary Shopify Fit Audit. Our team will review your existing eCommerce platform to pinpoint where you could be losing sales and see if Shopify could be a better fit for your business.
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