For most of the 55 businesses I audited, the website was a marketing channel. A way to get found, generate enquiries, build credibility. Important, but not the whole business.
For some of them, the website was the business. Every transaction, every customer interaction, every pound of revenue flowed through it. When the website breaks, the business stops.
The Covid volume spike
A clothing retailer had been running about 50% of sales through the website before Covid. When the shops closed, that jumped beyond 70% practically overnight. The back-end systems weren't built for it.
Stock management that worked fine at lower volumes started creaking. Fulfilment processes designed for a few dozen online orders a day suddenly had to handle far more. Customer service queries spiked because people who'd normally walk into a shop were now emailing. The systems that had been adequate became bottlenecks.
The audit wasn't about visibility or marketing. It was about whether the machine could handle the load. This is a different kind of digital problem. Not "how do we get more traffic" but "how do we cope with the traffic we've got."
The product page problem
A jewellery company had beautiful product photography. The images were stunning. The product pages themselves had almost no text. One page had 127 words, and all of those were customer quotes rather than an actual product description.
Google needs text to understand what a page is about. A page with a photo and 127 words of testimonials gives Google almost nothing to work with. Competitors with worse products but better descriptions were ranking higher. The quality of the jewellery was irrelevant to Google. What mattered was what the page said about it.
For another retailer, the product descriptions were thin across the board. Brief, generic, interchangeable. Nothing that helped a buyer understand why this product rather than that one, or what made this particular item worth the price.
Platform dependency
A gaming furniture company had built decent sales through Amazon EU and their own website. The Amazon channel was performing well, but every sale came with platform fees. The own-site channel was underdeveloped.
The audit became about reducing dependency. How to drive more traffic to the company's own website where they keep the full margin. How to build the brand outside of Amazon's ecosystem. How to make the owned website a destination rather than a secondary option.
This is a problem any business selling through third-party platforms will eventually face. Amazon, Etsy, Not On The High Street, Booking.com. The platform gives you reach but takes a cut and owns the customer relationship. Building your own channel is harder but more sustainable.
Every second counts
When the website is the business, the stakes on every technical issue are higher. A page that takes five seconds to load on mobile isn't just annoying. It's lost revenue. A checkout process that breaks on certain devices isn't just a UX problem. It's orders that never happen. A product page with no description isn't just an SEO miss. It's a customer who goes to a competitor who bothered to write one.
The margins are thinner too. E-commerce businesses need to think about conversion rates, cart abandonment, average order value and customer lifetime value. A 1% improvement in conversion rate on a site doing a hundred thousand pounds a year is a thousand pounds. On a site doing a million, it's ten thousand.
If your website is your revenue
Treat it like you'd treat your best salesperson. Monitor its performance. Fix things that aren't working. Test it on every device. Time how fast it loads. Read your product descriptions as if you'd never heard of your company. Would you buy from this page?
And look at your analytics. If you're running an e-commerce business without understanding where your traffic comes from, which products people look at, where they abandon the checkout and what your conversion rate is, you're flying blind.
This article is part of a series based on findings from 55 digital audits. Read the full case study for the complete picture, or get in touch if you'd like an honest look at where your business stands.