9 Deadly Sins of Joomla Shop Administration

If you want your online shop to be just an expense and time sink, then consider implementing as many of the following 9 deadly sins of Joomla shop administration. These are some but not all common issues that I come across with existing and new Virtuemart shops:

You focus too much on price. Yes, the price is a powerful motivator for buyers and you have to keep an eye on what your competition is doing. However, if you simply determine your pricing based on what your competition is charging, you have deeper problems such as product and/or service differentiation and lack of innovation. And the worst of all, you're likely to go out of business because there will always be someone cheaper. So stop checking other sites for pricing all the time and find better use of your time than just making your products a few cents cheaper.

You installed and/or configured Google Analytics Incorrectly. If you're going to do a serious website analysis, you would have to review website analytics. A while ago, after several hours of research, I generated a list of recommendations for a client. At the same time, I congratulated on having significantly improved conversions and cutting back on unnecessary Google Adwords spending just to find out that the picture is completely the opposite. The actual site conversions went down and the paid Adwords spending was up. So as it's almost always the case, no data is better than false data.

You don't monitor important website metrics. In order to improve your business performance over time, you should develop a set of metrics that clearly demonstrate your business progress or lack of one. Having clearly defined online marketing and sales metrics will keep you on track to achieving your monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual goals. Additionally, if you keep logs of your daily activities, you will be able to tell which ones contribute to the biggest business improvements.

You have a website section called “Online Shop.” Instead of calling a part of your website “online shop,” you should make it an integral part of your entire website with links and product intros listed on your blog, home page and other informative pages of your site. A shortcut to main or relevant shop category pages should be published just a click away. In the early days of Internet, hosted shopping software was cost prohibitive so the most static HTML sites had off-site services to support the ordering process which they called “online store.” However, that's no longer necessary nor recommended.

You implemented a non-intuitive site architecture. This could go either way where all your pages are linked to each other or where there are too many unnecessary clicks. Sometimes I even see shopping sites with over 100 links per page which is likely to have a negative impact on your search engine listings because these types of pages are often associated with unethical linking practices. The easiest way to deal with this mess is to complete a user experience study and act on professionally made recommendations.

You hope that the search engine traffic will happen on its own. If your content is very specific or does not have a commercial goal, you are likely to come up high in search engines if you correctly address all onpage search engine ranking factors. However, if you hope to achieve financial benefit from your site you have to do a lot more work because over half of search engine rankings depend on what other websites say about you (incoming links, anchor text, …). So start your Internet marketing plan by assessing the current situation and where you would like to be.

You focus on meeting marketing and sales objectives after your online store implementation. After starting on a project implementation, I was once asked by the project sponsor what the new site would do for their business. While I thought we already discussed the business benefits, obviously the desired outcome was still not clear. So basically, you have to determine business benefits and objectives you're trying to achieve well in advance. While sometimes you may get lucky due to lack of competition or simply by accident , to improve your odds or generating the best business ROI, you have to do proper research and planning well in advance.

You mix up languages on international sites. Multilingual shopping sites are sometimes the most expensive and hardest ecommerce development projects. And it only makes it worse when you start associating translations to wrong languages. Not only that this becomes confusing to actual visitors but search engines are very likely to demote your site due to less than ideal crawlability issues.

You don't align technical migrations with your business initiatives. As a business owner, you are mostly interested in your marketing and sales figures. However, sometimes you should consider or be reminded by your Joomla consultant to complete certain technical migrations and security improvements at the same time as your major business initiatives for a more cost effective Joomla maintenance. 

What do you think of my 9 Deadly Sins of Joomla shop administrations? If you have some other examples, please list them in comments below.