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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
WooCommerce has published an important article on retaining existing eCommerce customers. It's hard work gaining a new customer but it can be much easier convincing them to purchase again if you employ the right strategies.
These include:
- Send email confirmations about their purchase
- Give loyalty discounts
- Send segmented emails based on previous purchases
- Ask for reviews and testimonials
- Create an affiliate program
Learn about Ten Top Customer Retention Strategies
We've made some updates to our popular WooCommerce Variation Swatches post which looks at how to incorporate this functionality on your store.
We discuss how swatches can aid user experience and describe our own CommerceKit swatches module which integrates them seamlessly on both listings pages and product pages.
See how variation swatches can improve your store
Google Optimize is an increasingly popular tool for eCommerce stores to undertake split-testing.
Split-testing refers to the practice of creating two different versions of a page - say a product page - serving each to 50% of visitors and observing which one converts better.
Experimentation tools that use asynchronous scripts – such as Google Optimize recommend using an anti-flicker snippet to hide the page until they've finished executing. But this practice comes with some performance measurement pitfalls.
Andy Davies looks at this in more detail in this enlightening article.
Understand the performance impact of anti-flicker snippets
If users cannot find the answers to their questions or are not exposed to critical messaging, they will not act, and your website will fail. To prevent that from happening, you need an effective information architecture.
An effective Information Architecture is particularly important for eCommerce stores with large catalogs and numerous product categories or silos.
Paul Boag's excellent article uses a technique called Open Card Sorting to focus solely on organizing the top content and ignore the less important questions, objections, and tasks.
Read about creating an easy to use Information Architecture
DoS and DDoS attacks on a live website can be incredibly destructive and lead to losses of thousands of dollars if not prevented.
These are different to the unfortunately more common issue of fraudulent orders. See our guide on how to prevent these.
The goal of this article from GridPane is to first help you identify if you are in fact under attack, discover the attacking IP addresses, and then block those IP addresses.
Learn how to Mitigate DoS and DDoS Attacks on Your Site
I'm a big fan of Josh Comeau's. He has a great knack of making complex topics easy to understand and this 45 minute video on CSS is an example of that.
CSS can sometimes feel like a very inconsistent language. Why is this snippet I've used countless times suddenly behaving differently?!
As he puts it, when we take the time to learn how CSS works, the language starts to make a lot more sense, and the unpleasant surprises become much less common.
If you want to level up your CSS skills this is a great video to watch and learn from.
Discover the Secret Mechanisms of CSS from Josh Comeau
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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