cultureblog

In the day to day hustle and bustle of running your own online business, it’s important to periodically go through your own website and ensure that things are in proper order. Just as you would with any retail business, it’s important to “walk the showroom floor”, so to speak and make sure that the things you depend on to operate your business are functioning correctly. With your online store, you should go through every step of your checkout process and actually run a live dollar transaction to make sure that everything works and also that your customer experience is the way it should be. Things are constantly changing online – new web browsers get released and updated, website hosting servers get patched, security subscriptions expire etc, and these changes can cause formatting errors, popup security alerts and even broken pages and checkout problems. Very often these problems could be occurring for days or even weeks before you find out. Don’t rely on your customer to take time out of their busy day to notify you of any errors they encounter.

This is especially important if you have employees making continuous updates to your website content. Most shopping cart platforms, including MIVA Merchant, have global headers and footers for content that is included on every page of the site, such as your site navigation links, footer information and promotional banners. This content is being delivered to the web browser when a visitor is on both non-secure pages as well as on secure pages, such as when in the checkout process. As the global areas of your site get updated with new content, you need to make sure the links to banners or security badges or any tracking codes are created correctly so that they are accessible on every page in the website and do not cause security alerts or broken images.

Of course, having a reliable and professional development support team handling your store maintenance and website updates will minimize any shopping cart problems, but it’s always smart business to be hands-on with your online store. Even in the absence of any technical problems, it’s still a good idea to run through things and keep the customer experience fresh and up-to-date. Never just assume that if your shopping cart worked ok yesterday, it still will today. Check, check and triple check.