5 critical mistakes when relaunching your online store

Relaunching your online store can be a great way to bring your website up to date, improve the customer experience, structure your product data more precisely, get rid of unwanted and outdated software, or simply give your store a fresher look.

Relaunch – great opportunity or incalculable risk?

However, a relaunch always involves certain risks, especially if the operator is not sufficiently prepared for possible sources of error and does not know the pitfalls. In the following article, we present six mistakes that you should definitely avoid when relaunching your online store.

Mistake number 1: Lack of planning

A relaunch of your online store requires comprehensive planning and preparation. It is an excellent way to get rid of the existing faults and imperfections of the “old”, but it takes time.


However, this is much easier said than done! You don’t believe that? Then please compile a complete list of all the imperfections in the current system off the top of your head!

If your first reaction was that you still need to coordinate with colleagues, division managers, shift supervisors, sales managers and marketing, you’re on the right track! The relaunch is your chance for a second rendez-vous. A new start on a solid foundation. An adventurous journey in the knowledge that they know the way back to safe harbor.

You should therefore think carefully in advance about which functions and content your website should have in the future and how you want to implement them. Ask yourself the question “What do we miss most?”

If there is no detailed planning, no overview of the important, less important and nice-to-have features, you can quickly lose track and forget important elements or prioritize them incorrectly. With over 20 years of experience in dealing with relaunches, we can say very clearly that this will have a negative impact on the outcome of the relaunch and lead to disappointment.

This plays a very important role in search engine optimization. When a website is restructured or redesigned, the URLs often change. If the old URLs are then not redirected to the new address, the search engines cannot link the old URLs to the new URLs.

A permanent redirect helps to maintain the ranking of the website and ensure that the search engines index the new URL. The mail is therefore forwarded to the correct recipient at the new address.

Mistake number 3: Google Ads agency not brought on board

In any case, you should talk to your Google Ads agency in good time and with sufficient lead time for the relaunch: they have aligned all campaigns to the old URLs and optimized them for a long time. If the campaigns now redirect users who are ready to buy to empty pages, the relaunch will fail right away!

Mistake number 4: Neglecting basic SEO diligence work

SEO is cumbersome, takes a long time and is expensive!

Yes, that’s right! SEO is exhausting because you have to deal with the needs of the target group. No boldly shouted advertising message sells as well as a perfectly crafted benefit argument that is closely aligned with the customer’s needs.

And because SEO is a comparatively “modern” marketing discipline that focuses on the right target group, SEOs want to know and work out precisely these details …

Take your time and work on these details – write clear and distinct page titles, give your images alt texts and check the wording and headings again and again. Until everything is really “in place”. You will have other things to do later than catch up on yesterday’s homework.

Mistake number 5: User experience: leading or misleading users …

The user experience plays a decisive role in your customers’ purchasing decisions. If your website is confusing or unattractive, potential buyers will quickly lose interest and switch to another provider. As a rule of thumb: the content the user is looking for should be accessible within three clicks – if this is not the case, it is better to revise the navigation structure again …

Remember: you are the provider of the perfect solution for a very specific problem. Your customers should therefore find this solution quickly and easily. If you don’t succeed, you can quickly jump back to the search engine results list – after all, there are hundreds of other providers with comparable solutions…

Therefore, when relaunching your online store, make sure you guide users well and combine benefit arguments with emotions. In terms of developmental psychology, our intuitive and unconscious decisions are processed in the same area of the brain as emotions. So if you can trigger positive emotions through the structure of content alone, you have already made an important contribution to brand identification.

Before you go online with your new website, you should test it in a suitable staging environment on various end devices such as desktop computers, tablets and smartphones and ensure that all functions work properly. Intuitive navigation and an appealing design are also important factors for a positive user experience.

Mistake number 6: Too much change at once

Another mistake you should definitely avoid when relaunching your online store is making too many changes at once. The opportunity seems favorable to really want to improve everything in one fell swoop – but the danger of getting bogged down increases with every detail.

How to find the balance between desire and reality?

If you completely redesign your website and add lots of new functions, customers can quickly become overwhelmed and feel disoriented.

Employees also feel overwhelmed when entire system landscapes are changed from one day to the next.

It would be better to see the relaunch not as a snapshot, but as a process. Step by step, parts of the complex whole are updated and replaced. This reduces the error and frustration rate and gives marketing the opportunity to literally “celebrate” every step in external communication.

Take a look at the website of the eCommerce giant Amazon. From memory, do you even know of a “different Amazon design”? Has Amazon really never done a relaunch?

Yes, eCommerce giants like Amazon run hundreds of user experience A/B tests every day, analyze the data and take many small steps throughout the year. They don’t think of relaunches as a moment, but as a never-ending process. Exciting, isn’t it?

It is also advisable to analyze the content of the website more closely in order to decide which content to keep, improve or remove. You should ask yourself the following questions:

• Which content performed particularly well?
• Which URLs have generated high traffic, conversions, sales, rankings, clicks and backlinks?

It is also worth checking whether there are any other contents that should be taken along. Especially for online stores, your own images or product information in PDF files can contribute to rankings and traffic. Tools such as the Google Search Console help to collect information about your own URLs with clicks and impressions, while Google Analytics measures traffic, sales and conversions. SEO tools such as Sistrix or Searchmetrics identify top rankings and backlinks of URLs that you should urgently have “on your radar” during the relaunch

Conclusion

A relaunch of your online store can be a great way to bring your website up to date, improve the customer experience and appear fresher on the market.

But where there is a lot of opportunity, there is also a lot of risk. Especially if you are not sufficiently prepared for possible sources of error.

The pitfalls listed here are by no means an exhaustive list; you have probably already thought of one or two details and taken sufficient precautions. However, the question always remains whether you have really thought of all the details to minimize or even exclude default risks.

Relaunch specialist consultant

For complex, confusing and large projects, experienced consultants need to be on board. The people who probably have the most experience with relaunches are probably us web agencies. Because relaunches are part of our everyday business and over the course of many years we have certainly found & mastered many problems. For your next relaunch, you can count on our many years of experience and get experienced web workers at your side.