The essential ecommerce checklist for optimizing your online store

5. Merchandising 

Merchandising isn’t just for brick-and-mortar stores anymore. It’s critical for ecommerce sites to merchandise so engage customers and get them excited about their shopping experience. 

In the digital world, merchandising your ecommerce site is all about organizing your products so customers can easily and quickly find what they’re looking for. Think: arranging products in an aesthetically pleasing order, highlighting special promotions, boosting new or best selling products, creating seasonal or sale landing pages, and so on. You can even create marketing campaigns based on your merchandising (or vice versa). 

The good news is, merchandising your online store doesn’t have to be a time-consuming endeavor. By leveraging automation and rules, you can deliver seamless, intuitive shopping experiences and get the right products in front of the right shoppers at the right time – without manually moving each individual item up and down the page.

6. Recommendations 

The online shopping journey can be a highly customized experience for shoppers, with the right solutions. Intelligent suggestions that are personalized to the user are far more likely to drive conversions than a random selection of additional items added to the bottom of a product detail page. 

What does that look like? 

• Cross-sell recommendations (Ex: add those geometric earrings to match that new blazer in your cart)
• Similar items recommendations (Ex: check out these other women’s blazers)
• Trending products recommendations (Ex: popular items “black faux-leather leggings” and “white silk blouse”)
• Personal recommendations (Ex: you might like these products based on your order history and recently viewed items)

And so much more. Customizing someone’s experience with your store can make a huge difference to their overall experience, as long as it’s done strategically. 

7. Site speed 

Unbounce reports that “nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.” That’s a big risk to take. Can you afford it? 

That’s not the only risk. Not only are they less likely to make a purchase, they’re also less likely to return to a slow site.

Source: Unbounce

Site speed isn’t a “check it and forget it” line item on your ecommerce checklist, it’s something to be monitored and optimized regularly. Here are a few ways you can improve your site’s speed: 

• Reduce your image file size without losing quality with sites like TinyJPG
• Reduce redirects (for example from or to mobile sites)
• And here are a few more tips from Moz

8. Reviews

These days, customers trust other customers more than they trust brands. So let customers share their feedback about your products right on the product detail page in the form of user-generated content. Adding this form of social proof can greatly increase your sales since the average customer reads 10 reviews, according to HubSpot. 

Reviews can also play a valuable role in your merchandising strategy by allowing shoppers to sort and filter products based on ratings. Or, you can boost your top-rated products to the top of search and category pages so customers instantly find results that are backed up by reviews. For more inspiration, check out how two online retailers use Searchspring and TrustPilot to amplify their merchandising with customer reviews.

Reviewing your ecommerce website checklist 

Remember, just because your store is operational doesn’t mean you there isn’t room for continual improvements. Optimization, by its very nature, is never-ending. Using this ecommerce checklist as a handy tool will help you keep track of areas of improvement and where to look out for fixes. For more resources to keep your store in tip top shape, add these site search and merchandising guides to your ecommerce checklist.