Store Audit

When most online sellers look to improve their store performance, they look online for answers. The problem with this approach is that the vast majority of key opinion leaders, influencers, and leaders in ecommerce tend to focus on the next big thing. Their content celebrates a growth-hack, tactic, or strategy that they recently learned and wish to share.

While some of these initiatives are certainly worth pursuing, it keeps online sellers trapped into a cycle: They are always chasing after a new silver bullet. Online sellers instead need to take a much more balanced approach. They need to look inwards as much as they look outwards. In other words, they need to examine how their store is performing, what issues there are, and where they can improve the most.

This kind of store audit is admittedly unsexy. It’s much more exciting to experiment with a new growth-hack rather than analyse what is happening with your store regularly and acting on it. Despite this fact, a store audit is extremely high leverage: Examining where your shop stands can be an extraordinary opportunity for growth.

In fact, for some online sellers, their first store audit can be a watershed moment: They can uncover issues that have gone unnoticed in the day-to-day operations of their business, determine how to solve them, and enjoy exponential growth from there.

But running a store audit is easier said than done, given that online shops are composed of many moving parts. This issue of Sellingnomics will walk sellers through what a store audit is, why they should implement one on a regular basis, and how they can address common challenges in running them. Doing so will give online sellers a high-level overview of the business that will help them intelligently bypass competitors still hyper-focused on a grab-bag of marketing tricks and hacks.