Using the Right eCommerce Tools with Joerg Strotmann

06/12/21 • 24 min

Key Takeaways

Digital strategy has gone from being the last thing people think about to the most important aspect of selling online.
eCommerce grew more from March-May 2020 than it did in the previous 10 years.
Over 150 Million people purchased online for the first time in 2020.
Speed, stability, and security are non-negotiable if you want to grow your website. Peak conversion is no more than 2.7 seconds. Every 100 millisecond delay over that can reduce conversion by up to 7%.
People are shopping in-store, on websites, and on social channels. This is called omnichannel marketing.
You should make it as easy as possible for people to give you money. Simplicity is key to get people to act, so make sure you offer multiple payment methods, and can serve your products wherever your buyers are in the world.
Site security means protection against hackers, PCI compliance, DDoS mitigation when necessary, and site-wide HTTPS.
The Plesk eCommerce Toolkit allows you to have a fast, stable, secure website that is easy to maintain, with everything you need...including omnichannel marketing.

Digital strategy has gone from being the last thing people think about to the most important aspect of selling online.
eCommerce grew more from March-May 2020 than it did in the previous 10 years.
Over 150 Million people purchased online for the first time in 2020.
Speed, stability, and security are non-negotiable if you want to grow your website. Peak conversion is no more than 2.7 seconds. Every 100 millisecond delay over that can reduce conversion by up to 7%.
People are shopping in-store, on websites, and on social channels. This is called omnichannel marketing.
You should make it as easy as possible for people to give you money. Simplicity is key to get people to act, so make sure you offer multiple payment methods, and can serve your products wherever your buyers are in the world.
Site security means protection against hackers, PCI compliance, DDoS mitigation when necessary, and site-wide HTTPS.
The Plesk eCommerce Toolkit allows you to have a fast, stable, secure website that is easy to maintain, with everything you need...including omnichannel marketing.

Simplicity is the name of the game. You probably only need 1⁄3 of the features you want.
You don’t need complex faceting and search. Customers aren’t going to use those.
Hosting doesn’t matter most of the time when it comes to performance. Yes - shared hosting is less secure, but throwing hardware at a performance problem is a band-aid, not a solution.
Good hosting still can’t account for slow internet connections, and bloated sites will always load slowly there.
Stop relying on a caching plugin. It doesn’t make your site faster - it makes it look faster. You can’t just cache everything, especially on an ecommerce site.
Check performance with Query Monitor. It’s a great, free plugin for WordPress. Look for colors. Red is bad, Green is good! Look for numbers and make them lower.
Database hits are usually the culprit when it comes to ecommerce performance. Optimize your database calls (or hire someone to).
Post Meta is another thing that’s really detrimental to WordPress sites — there are a lot of database hits and complex queries associated with them.
As you evaluate features, try to cut away as much as possible. Ask yourself:
- How does this feature/plugin/add-on make me money?
- Are website visitors actually using this feature/plugin/add-on?