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A functional eCommerce store is made up of two components: a feature-rich eCommerce application and a fast, scalable hosting solution. Once you have settled on an eCommerce application for your online retail store, it’s time to decide on a hosting solution. Hosting provides the bandwidth, storage, compute, and database resources an eCommerce store needs.

In this article, we’re going to look at the qualities of a great eCommerce hosting provider and at the types of hosting suitable for online retail.

Cheap Shared Hosting Is Not The Best Option

Modern eCommerce applications like Magento and WooCommerce are built on standard technology like MySQL and PHP. Any web hosting platform can run an eCommerce store, but not all provide the resources, support, and eCommerce-specific optimizations that a great online retail experience requires.

For very low traffic eCommerce stores, a standard shared hosting account or virtual private server might be adequate, but you will soon run into resource, performance, scaling, and security problems as your business grows.

Choosing a specialist managed eCommerce hosting provider with expertise in your chosen application will be slightly more expensive, but you’ll save time and money throughout the life of your business.

The Qualities Of An Excellent eCommerce Hosting Provider

A good eCommerce hosting provider understands the hosting requirements of eCommerce applications and the needs of eCommerce businesses. An eCommerce store isn’t an ordinary website.

Performance-optimized hosting: Speed and responsiveness are vital. Slow stores make less money. Look for a web hosting provider with the technical ability to optimize their networks, servers, and software stack for the best possible performance.

Managed Services: A world-class eCommerce host will provide managed services that help retailers make the most of the hosting platform. Managed services should include performance optimization, security hardening, and comprehensive backup services.

Support: Responsive support is vital. You don’t want to be left twiddling your thumbs if an issue arises with your store during a busy shopping period. Look for an eCommerce host who is prepared to work with you and your team to secure, scale, and optimize the reliability of your store.

A reputation for security: Security is vital at all levels of eCommerce hosting, from the data center to the application itself. Make sure your eCommerce host can demonstrate the quality of its security controls with third-party certifications like SSAE 16 and PCI DSS. Additionally, verify that the provider’s platform runs the most recent software versions and that the software stack is regularly updated — you’d be surprised how many hosting providers use outdated and vulnerable software.

Choosing The Right Hosting

There are three main types of eCommerce hosting suitable for applications like Magento and WooCommerce: shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, and clusters of dedicated servers.

Shared eCommerce hosting: With shared hosting, the resources of a server are shared between several eCommerce stores. Unlike standard shared web hosting, a reputable eCommerce hosting provider strictly limits the number of stores each server supports. eCommerce-optimized shared hosting is ideal for smaller stores.

Dedicated Server eCommerce hosting: Each store has access to the resources of an enterprise-grade dedicated server. Dedicated servers are the most powerful single-server hosting option available. Dedicated servers are suitable for medium to large eCommerce stores.

Dedicated Server Clusters: The most powerful eCommerce hosting option, clusters combine the resources of several dedicated servers, with each server taking responsibility for a different aspect of the store’s functionality, including web servers, file servers, and database servers. Clusters are capable of supporting the largest eCommerce stores and can be scaled indefinitely.

As an eCommerce store grows, its hosting should be able to grow with it. By choosing a provider that offers hosting options suitable for stores from the smallest to the largest, eCommerce merchants establish a long-term relationship with a host who can support their business throughout its life.

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eCommerce is the future of retail, but what will the eCommerce store of the future look like? Will eCommerce businesses sell their products via third-party channels like eBay or Amazon, or will they invest in an eCommerce website they control? Will eCommerce apps take the place of traditional eCommerce stores on the web platform?

It’s hard to predict what will happen in an era of rapidly evolving technology and consumer behavior, but we think the web-based eCommerce store is here to stay. Retailers will invest in mobile eCommerce apps and they will sell via many channels, but at the center there will be an eCommerce website designed, managed, marketed, and controlled by the retailer.

A web eCommerce store supported by an application like Magento or WooCommerce offers two advantages that other channels do not: it’s on the web and it doesn’t depend on third-party platforms.

Why Does The Web Matter?

The web matters because it’s where people find your store: Google sends a massive amount of traffic to eCommerce stores, and most consumers search on the web. The web is everywhere, whereas persuading shoppers to install native applications is challenging.

Evidence shows that many consumers prefer to shop on the web, and while mobile eCommerce can’t be ignored, nor can the significant proportion of purchases that are made from non-mobile browsers. Retailers without a web presence are at a disadvantage.

Five years ago, native mobile apps offered the best eCommerce experience, but today’s web is different. In 2018, the web platform is competitive with the native app experience, and with the introduction of Progressive Web Apps, the distance between web and native is even narrower.

Why Does Control Matter?

Third-party retail channels like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and others generate a lot of revenue for eCommerce retailers. Social eCommerce and instant messaging eCommerce are an important part of the future of retail. But third-party channels have a drawback: they force retailers to cede control to the platform.

Retailers with a hosted web eCommerce store don’t face that risk. They don’t have to worry about “pivots” and “platform sunsetting” pulling the rug out from under them. They don’t have to align their business model to the business model of the platform owner. Independent web stores can access more data than retailers constrained to third-party platforms — data they don’t have to share.

Another important freedom is the ability to move an eCommerce business to a different platform or hosting provider. It’s straightforward to migrate a Magento or WooCommerce store to a different web hosting provider. It’s only a little more difficult to move from a Magento store to a WooCommerce store or vice versa. It’s almost impossible to move lock, stock, and barrel from a third-party marketplace when you depend on it and its audience for all of your revenue.

One Home, Many Channels

Omni-channel eCommerce doesn’t mean abandoning the control provided by a central web-based eCommerce store. Magento offers excellent integration with multiples channels: the Sellbrite extension is just one example of a tool that can integrate an existing eBay, Amazon, and Etsy retail with a Magento web presence.

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In 2018, there is no excuse for a slow eCommerce store. Shoppers don’t have the patience to wait while pages load or slow search and checkout features struggle to react to input. Performance optimization involves taking a close look at your eCommerce store and how it works, figuring out why it’s slow, and making the necessary changes.

At a high level, performance optimization can be divided into two broad categories: client-side or front-end optimization that deals with loading and executing code and other assets in the browser, and server-side or backend optimization, which focuses on improving the speed at which web pages are generated and sent to the browser.

Choose The Right Hosting Provider

The right hosting provider is vital to low-latency eCommerce performance. If an eCommerce store runs on a slow or unoptimized server, it will never be fast, no matter how hard you work to optimize it. If the store’s server doesn’t have the resources it needs to cope with the traffic it receives, it will perform poorly under load.

The solution is to migrate to a hosting plan with more resources or to a hosting provider capable of offering the performance eCommerce shoppers expect.

Understand The Problem

eCommerce stores are complex and there are many opportunities for optimization, but retailers need to know what’s going wrong before they can fix it. Data allows you to identify the real cause of the problem, rather than wasting time on theoretical performance optimizations.

We recommend using a combination of Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom Tools to gather actionable performance metrics.

Client-Side Optimization

Client-side or front-end optimization focuses on improving the performance of a store’s pages in the browser. There are two basic approaches: reducing the size and number of the assets that have to be loaded, and reducing the size and complexity of JavaScript code.

The tools we suggested above provide a good starting point for optimization, but here are three optimizations that are almost certain to make pages load faster:

Reduce HTTP requests: Although HTTP/2 makes this step less important, if your server or your shoppers’ browsers don’t support HTTP/2, reducing HTTP requests can make a significant difference to front-end performance. The easiest way to reduce the number of requests is to concatenate JavaScript and CSS files.

Optimize images: Images are an important part of any eCommerce product page, but they’re also often the largest. Use tools like ImageOptim or a web service like Kraken.io to remove extraneous metadata and reduce the size of images without reducing their quality.

Remove unnecessary JavaScript: JavaScript is an essential part of the modern web, but you can have too much of a good thing. Do you really need all that tracking, social sharing, and UI code?

Server-Side Optimization

The best server-side optimization is to choose a web hosting provider that does most of the work for you, providing powerful servers, an optimized software stack, and a low-latency network.

A good web hosting provider will also help you out with a couple of other optimizations that can significantly improve load-times and reduce latency: a content distribution network and server-side caching.

A content distribution network (CDN) distributes an eCommerce store’s static assets — JavaScript and CSS files, images, pre-rendered HTML — to servers located around the world. When shoppers requests those assets, they are delivered from the closest CDN servers, which reduces latency and the load on the main server.

Caching stores the output of requests so that they don’t have to be generated by code that accesses the database every time a browser requests the same information. eCommerce is a dynamic process, and caching works well with data that changes infrequently, but it can nevertheless significantly boost the perceived performance of an eCommerce store.

Caching solutions are available for WooCommerce and Magento, both as plugins or extensions, and as external caching applications like Varnish and Memcached.

A slow eCommerce store hurts sales and revenue, so it’s worth investing the time to reduce latencies and build a fast and fluid shopping experience.Slow eCommerce stores lose out on sales and revenue — we look at the how and the why of eCommerce optimization

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Once upon a time, building a website that provided a responsive and intuitive eCommerce experience was next to impossible for all but the simplest stores. Today’s web is different. Many of us use desktop-class applications in our browsers every day. Browsers are faster than ever before, especially where JavaScript is concerned, and the web platform itself benefits from improved client and server side technology and developer-friendly frameworks.

And yet, I often hear eCommerce merchants debating the benefits of native applications.

Native applications sound like something eCommerce merchants that reach a certain size should invest in. Native applications are faster than web applications, and they’re likely to stay that way until WebAssembly enters mainstream use. Native applications can take advantage of device hardware that is clumsy or impossible to access on the web.

However, with some exceptions I’ll discuss later, native applications are typically not a good investment for eCommerce retailers.

The most important argument against building a native application for eCommerce retail is that the majority of customers won’t use it. Studies have shown that shoppers prefer to interact with eCommerce stores on the web — they prefer to locate stores, read product reviews, make purchases, and check order statuses on the web. Theoretically, a properly designed native application could provide a marginally better shopping experience, but there’s plenty of evidence that it’s not what shoppers want.

Look at the home screen of your iOS or Android phone. How many shopping applications do you have installed? For most consumers, the answer is none, and even dedicated shoppers are selective about the shopping applications they install.

Given that most shoppers prefer the web, is a native app really the best investment? A bespoke native application is expensive to build and manage, and it adds a huge amount of complexity to development, especially if the retailer wants to create an app that is available on all the major mobile platforms.

It makes sense to focus development work on a single codebase, a responsive web application that works everywhere from the desktop to the smartphone. The modern web has access to many of the same capabilities as native applications via browser APIs, including push notifications. The gap between what’s possible on the web and in native applications is shrinking rapidly.

Although I don’t think building a parallel native eCommerce application is the best use of a retailer’s time and money, that doesn’t mean there’s no place for native applications in eCommerce. Leading eCommerce brands use native apps to raise consumer awareness and for content marketing. Fashion brand Miu Miu created a music app to showcase fashion show excerpts and a custom soundtrack. Paul Smith released Paul Smith Dino Jumper, a retro platform game. An app from Hermés demonstrates all the ways its customers might wear their scarves and ties.

The creative use of native applications can boost brand awareness, but there’s little point duplicating a web store as a native app — let each platform play to its strengths and user-base.

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Social proof is a vital part of eCommerce conversion rate optimization. Unlike in brick-and-mortar stores, customers can’t inspect products in person. Shoppers can’t know for sure that they’ll get what they expect. Social proof, in the form of positive reviews, lets customers know that other people were happy with their purchase.

But few shoppers leave positive reviews — and why would they? Taking the time to write a positive review does nothing for the customer. They already have the product they paid for and they have nothing to gain from reviewing it.

However, customers who are not happy with their purchase are more than willing to make their opinions known. Satisfaction is less motivating than the opposite, and the imbalance is the bane of eCommerce retailers.

One dissatisfied customer who writes a review has more of an impact than a thousand happy customers who don’t. A couple of negative reviews on a product page or on social media can do real financial damage to a retail business, especially if those reviews find their way into a prominent position on Google.

Retailers shouldn’t leave positive reviews to chance. Some eCommerce retailers solve the positive review problem dishonestly, by manufacturing their reviews. I wouldn’t encourage that practice: customers can often spot a fake review, and if they have the slightest suspicion their trust in a store can be destroyed.

So how should eCommerce retailers get positive reviews?

Ask For Positive Reviews

If you don’t ask, you don’t get. It’s important not to alienate customers by “begging” for reviews or employing manipulative techniques, but there’s nothing wrong with asking politely. Effective review request emails make it clear that the retailer values the customer’s opinion, and that any information they provide will be taken seriously.

Time It Right

For the most part, you only get one opportunity to ask for a review. Make it count. Don’t send the review request email before the product has been delivered. Give the user some time to have an experience with their purchase before asking them to write about it.

Make It Easy

It should be as easy as possible to leave a review. When customers write a positive review, they’re doing you a favor — don’t make them work for it. Send a direct link to the review interface with the review request email, preferably with a unique identifier that ties the URL to their purchase.

Don’t ask too many questions: one question is fine, but a complex web form with many questions will discourage customers.

Your review system should work perfectly on mobile devices. People use their phones and tablets to read email, and if they can’t leave a review on the same device, the opportunity is wasted.

Provide Incentives

In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be necessary to create a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” review strategy, but if you’re having real difficult generating reviews, you may find incentives effective. I wouldn’t advise you pay: payment degrades the trustworthiness of reviews. But small discounts and perks can motivate reluctant reviewers to make an effort.

Convincing happy shoppers to leave reviews is one of the most challenging aspects of eCommerce, but the social proof of positive reviews can generate significant conversion rate improvements, so spending time on your review strategy is a sound investment.

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