For an eCommerce manager juggling a website's marketing features, usability, performance and stability it can be easy to fall from the path of best practice.
Deri Jones, CEO of SciVisum, provides some valuable insights into how to avoid the Seven Deadly Sins Of The eCommerce Manager.
1. Lust
eCommerce managers often lust for a mythical “perfection”, causing major problems.
In some organisations the pace of online change is frantic, and in the drive to 'catch up' with a competitor, the development team may be forced to bolt things on in an ad hoc manner. This works for a while but ultimately sales are lost as tech ‘rough edges’ cause sporadic errors and nasty problems. By the time new load tests discover certain User Journeys have shockingly lower capacity than others it can be a huge and expensive project to pull the whole site back on to a fast and robust architecture.
2. Gluttony
Every company and developer is aware of software bloat, but hardware is improving so fast that some developers believe they can afford to be gluttons of CPU cycles and memory. When business requires more features and Responsive Web interfaces, bloating is all too easy. Even with regular upgrades and capacity increases regular monitoring may reveal the embarrassing truth that user journeys have slowed.
So listen when developers say they could do more with less coding if allowed a new, better. framework, but watch your website's waistline and make sure that the “less coding” promise holds true! Define clear metrics for the framework, e.g. 20% faster delivery of all user journeys. Always load test a version in both the old and new frameworks to prove the benefit.
3. Avarice
Greed leads to short-term goals, resulting in technical debt and long-term site slowness. The more features hacked in, the harder it becomes to maintain the whole product. A rock solid product is one that will increase ROI not just cool features. If pretty bells and whistles cause, say, a loss of 5% of baskets during a manic sales season evening they have incurred a huge cost, despite that nice design award! Some organisations have now even built their sites so that certain features are disabled during extreme peaks to ensure that they never have anything but a rock-solid user experience.
4. Sloth
Sloth in eCommerce sins is apathy, not laziness! A “lazy” eCommerce Manager can be a highly effective one. Instead of trying to do everything, having a good relationship with developers built on trust, strategic understanding and a common language means less, but more profitable, work all round!
Whereas an apathetic eCommerce manager is not interested in understanding the technical reality that underlies consistently good user experience and, as a result, will allow ROI to slide as errors increase. Shared data, especially live User Journey performance up on a big screen, replaces lengthy meetings.
5. Wrath
Poor communication, misunderstandings and “not my department's concern” attitudes are at the root of much anger.
Arguments take up valuable time. Working in isolation can really damage the ongoing effectiveness of an eCommerce operation. A clear and comprehensive spec is harder to write than it seems, but taking the time to do so avoids a new feature turning out not quite as intended due to gaps in the business requirements.
6. Envy
It's impossible not to compare with the competition - Business School 101 teaches the Industry benchmark approach.
But great websites do not result from shaking together a bag full of individually cool, but unrelated, things. A mere copycat mentality will produce a “scarecrow site” where no feature fits well with any other. Stop being feature envious. Get ready to argue your case with the Powers That Be when they want you to “just copy” what a competitor has. And ban 'Feature lists' as a means of measuring site quality!
7. Pride
It's good when an eCommerce manager is proud of the team, the campaigns, the development, the joined up integration etc. When that pride closes the ears to new ways of measuring User Experience and good new things happening out in the fast moving eCommerce ecoSystem are ignored, then it will not be too long before it leads to a fall. Resisting these temptations allows marketing managers to really focus on the users, and the bottom line, and forge strong links with the IT departments they depend on. A solid relationship between IT and Marketing departments is a sure sign of an organisation being at the crest of the eMaturity curve.
