January is when eCommerce store owners convince themselves this is the year everything will be different. New goals. New tools. New strategies. New me. New you.
Meanwhile, the same problems are still sitting there from last year, and the year before.
Sound familiar?
The truth is, most eCommerce growth comes from fixing the things that quietly bleed revenue: tracking that doesn’t match, product pages missing key info, category pages sorted like a garage sale, slow mobile performance, and email automations that were “on my to-do list” since 2023.
So let’s talk about things you should be doing right now that actually increase traffic and sales, and will probably have you saying “thanks Wizards,” later on in the year!
1) Make sure your data is not lying to you
If your tracking is off, you will optimize the wrong things all year. You’ll pause campaigns that are working, drop more money on campaigns that aren’t, and you’ll spend too much time arguing about why the numbers don’t match.
Go into Google Analytics and confirm purchases are firing once (not three times), revenue matches what your platform says, and your core eCommerce events are behaving. Then look at UTMs, because nothing says “we’re winging it” like ten different versions of “email-blast” in reporting. After that, verify your ad platform tags and pixels.
The fastest “is this broken?” test is comparing your top landing pages to your top revenue-driving pages. If what you’re looking at makes no sense, tracking is probably the problem.
You run a big January promo and Google Analytics says revenue is up 22%. Awesome. Then you check your actual platform sales and you’re flat.
That’s usually one of two things: purchases are being double-counted in tracking, or revenue is being attributed to the wrong source.
Fix this first, because every decision you make next depends on it.
2) Fix product data, because it affects traffic and conversion
Product data is one of those areas that feels like “busy work” until you realize just how important it really is.
Since the first box of ferret treats was sold on the Internet back in 1994, the rules have pretty much been the same. Bad titles hurt SEO and ads. Missing UPCs can mess with feed performance. Weak product descriptions lower conversion rates. Missing variant images increase returns. And if your weights and dimensions are wrong, you get to play the fun game of “why are losing so much money on shipping?”
Start with a product data audit. Our Product Missing Data tool for both Shopify and BigCommerce is just what you need for this. It easily allows you to find products missing key details like descriptions, UPC codes, and more.
Then, focus on the pages that really matter: your bestsellers, your top categories, and anything you’re paying big bucks to advertise.
You don’t need to rewrite your entire product catalog in Q1. You need to fix the stuff that’s already getting a lot of attention.
“Protein Bar” is not a title. That’s a category.
A better title is: “Brand Name Protein Bar, Chocolate Peanut Butter, 12-Pack.”
Why? Because shoppers search that way, and feeds perform better when key attributes are obvious.
3) Rethink your SEO plan so it actually generates revenue
A lot of eCommerce SEO advice still sounds like this: “Write a blog post every day until Google loves you.”
That’s a lot of blogging. But all of that blogging isn’t driving sales.
Instead, focus on your “profit page” copy rather than blog posts. Category pages are where customers go to find the product they want to purchase. Not your blog! These pages deserve way more attention than most eCommerce store owners give them.
Your goal is to find pages that are close to being on page one, not pages that are buried 27 clicks in. If a category page is sitting on page two, that’s a great target. A few improvements can move it to where traffic actually happens – and matters!
And here’s the part most store owners skip: category pages should help shoppers choose. Add a short intro that answers the questions customers already have. Give them links to bestsellers to help them buy right now. Give people a path to make a purchase.
Instead of opening a category with “Check out all our blenders right here,” open with something useful like:“Shopping for a blender? If you’re making smoothies daily, focus on wattage and ounces. If you want a quieter blender, look for ones with insulated housings. Here are our bestsellers and the top picks for each use case.”
4) Make your store faster, because speed matters… A LOT!
Speed is not just a tech problem. It’s a money problem.
If your product pages take too long to load on mobile, shoppers bail. If your category page jumps around while it’s loading, shoppers get annoyed. If your images are huge and your scripts are heavy, your store feels slow even when everything looks “fine” in your office on superfast triple-gigabit WiFi.
Here’s what I tell store owners: stop testing the homepage only. Test the pages that actually make you money, especially best-selling product pages and top categories. If they are slow loading, you need to fix those right away.
Most speed fixes come down to removing bloat and fixing images. Older stores, or stores on slower platforms have a harder road ahead of them to fix speed issues and that’s when a redesign or replatforming comes into play.
If your store has 25 apps and 7 tracking scripts, you are basically asking every visitor to carry three months worth of groceries up the steps to their 3rd floor apartment before they can add an item to their cart.Start by removing any apps you’re not using. Then clean up leftover scripts from old tools and campaigns. (Yes, we see scripts from defunct CSEs and social platforms all the time.)
You’d be shocked how that alone improves conversion rate and site speed.
5) You’re running a real store, not a product database
If you owned a physical store, you would not put slow-moving inventory at the front door. You would have big displays with what sells, what’s seasonal, and what’s most likely to make the customer say “OMG, yes!”
Your category pages should work the same way.
If your bestsellers are buried on page three because your default sort is “Newest,” you’re making shoppers work too hard. And shoppers are lazy by default.
This is where sorting strategy matters and if you’re on the BigCommerce platform, our Magic Sorter app allows you to put the right products in front of the right shoppers, in exactly where you want them to be.
Here’s a simple rule that works: feature seasonal and promoted items first, then best sellers, then top rated, then everything else.
Also, stop letting out-of-stock products take prime real estate unless you’re capturing emails with some type of back-in-stock notification app.
6) Make email marketing a strategy, not “we send emails sometimes”
If your email strategy involves only sending “we have a lot of these we need to move,” or the random, “we haven’t had a sale in a while” campaigns, you’re missing the best part: automations.
Email automations are where the easy money is. Set up a welcome series to help make those first-time subscribers buy, or first-time customers come back. Abandoned cart emails are designed to capture what you already paid to acquire from that ad the customer clicked on. Post-purchase automations drive additional orders without needing another ad click, which saves you money.
The other big thing that most store owners avoid is list segmentation. Your VIP customers should not get the same emails as first-time buyers. Customers who haven’t ordered from you in months need a different message or offer than your repeat buyers.
And yes, deliverability matters. If your emails land in spam, it doesn’t matter how good your copy is.
7) Promotions should not just be about discounts
A new year is a perfect time to stop continually throwing out discounts because “that’s what works for us.”
Look back at last year’s promos and be honest with yourself. Which ones drove profit, and which ones drove volume but ruined margin? Which ones trained customers to wait for a better offer? Which ones created a customer service or warehouse nightmare?
Then build a plan for promotions that make sense for your margin. Threshold offers increase average order value by dangling a carrot in front of the shopper’s face as they add just a few dollars more to their cart. Bundles move more units without a profit killing discount. Gift-with-purchase offers often times feels more valuable to the customer than a discount, even if it costs you less.
Promotions are fine. Permanent discount culture is not.
8) Inventory issues are sales issues
Continual out-of-stocks cost you revenue today and customers tomorrow. When shoppers can’t buy, they simply buy somewhere else. That’s a fact and a painful one.
Identify products that generate a lot of sales and minimize the risk of having those go out-of-stock by tightening your reorder levels. Also, when something is out-of-stock, especially a hot or high profit generating item, do not turn the page into a dead end. Recommend substitutes, highlight alternatives, give them an option to be notified when it’s back in stock as some shoppers will not want a substitute. Do everything you can to make a sale for an alternate product, or get them to come back when you have it available again.
These things are not rocket science, and they’re definitely not “new.” That’s kind of the point. The things that drive traffic and sales in eCommerce are usually the same things that most store owners brush off, put on the back burner, or avoid because they feel tedious, technical, or never urgent enough.
But here’s the reality: these are the exact areas that cost you money every day they’re ignored. So use the new year for what it’s actually good for: a reason to finally follow through. Pick a few of these, schedule the work, and knock them out in a way you can maintain. Then, just as important, create a plan to keep reviewing them, because this isn’t a one-and-done project. It’s ongoing store maintenance.
If you do that, you’re not just “starting strong.” You’re setting yourself up to make meaningful improvements all year long, one fix at a time.
Scott Sanfilippo began his eCommerce journey in 1994 by co-founding one of the Internet’s first online retailers, TheFerretStore.com, which was acquired by PetCo in 2006. In 2001, he co-founded the eCommerce design and marketing firm Solid Cactus, which was acquired by web.com in 2009. Today, Scott is the General Manager of Your Store Wizards and lives in Delray Beach, FL. Scott can be contacted at scott@yourstorewizards.com.