by Theodores | 2025-10-15 14:35:02+00:00
Yes, and a lot of the pain is self-inflicted.

Too often I have been working on ecommerce gigs where the traffic comes from internal 'SEO' tools. Normally the person in charge is marketing, not technical, so it has always been difficult to get past identifying the problem to fixing it.

Often ecommerce companies are very siloed, so one person in one part of the 'team' is scraping the site with their special tools, only for another person to be doing another scrape with their special tools. You can have the guy doing the newsletter doing his thing, the guy doing organic search doing their thing, the guy doing paid ads doing their thing and someone in sales doing their own thing.

The sad thing is that they are typically just a few SQL joins away from exactly the data they want in a format they can digest. However, due to silo-ing, it can be hard to have that conversation.

On top of that, you do get new bots that need to be dealt with. The Huawei bot will scrape everything yet the store might not be delivering to China. So there are legit bots not doing ad fraud that need to be dealt with.

What I also find interesting is that nobody is interested in the server logs. They come for free, and, although not having CDN cache hits, they still record checkout transactions and any pages that don't have a freshly cached page.

Ad fraud also goes on in companies. I worked for a very successful company once and we only measured sales and what was out of stock. We didn't need open rates for emails or click through rates, our main problem was selling too much, which was a nice problem to have. Note that if you sell too much then you aren't going to get it all out the door in a timely fashion, or you run out of big lorries to put the orders in.

Since then I have not worked on a site that is as successful. Instead we have people getting praise for 'false metrics'. Anything an SEO person creates or a marketeer measures will always have some nonsense aspect to it. Or the accounting is mixed with brick and mortar sales even though free shipping and discounts have been given on each sale, with adwords used to get people through the 'door'.

Since sales manager has to report to someone on the board, if the sales numbers aren't good, the nonsense stats can be used to obfuscate the facts. The board only ever care about profit, so I don't like the way this goes down with false metrics of nonsense.

Another fundamental problem in ecommerce is a lack of basic salesmanship. If you work the shop floor doing specialist sales where you have to listen to the customer's needs, then you gain experience in the art of sales. You haven't got to be good at it, in fact it can be better to know your limitations, for me that is big ticket items where I don't have the product knowledge, however, I could always hand those sales over to a much more capable colleague.

You don't win every sale, but, in retail, you can have some really good streaks where no customer leaves empty handed. Your conversion rate is going to be more like 90% in face to face sales if you have the right product at the right price, with customers that don't buy coming back the following day or week to splash the cash.

In High Street retail there is no way you give customers 15%+ off just for stepping through the door. Yet this is table stakes in ecommerce, particularly for small to medium size shops. This instantly devalues the product.

Often there will be chatbots for whatever reason, and I am sure the likes of Dell can get that right, but your typical small ecommerce site will fluff this up too, so any customer daring to use the chatbot will not get instant help from a sales person.

So what to do?

It depends on your product, however, the goal is to get customers for life, not to churn through them. To achieve this it comes down to product, price, availability, shipping times, customer service and incentives for the customer to advertise for you, with reviews, word of mouth and all that hard stuff that needs real human skill. Sometimes it will only be a one-off sale, for example, if someone is buying a mattress. But, even then, the customer service basics matter.

What is also silly is how, with everything you buy, you will get adverts and incentives to buy what you have just purchased. I don't know why this is not considered career limiting, but nobody seems to have fixed this.

Next time, I will find out what data everyone needs and have my own script to collect just that data, then have a live backup that can be used for all internal purposes such as report generation. There will be no mystery script containers downloading 150 scripts with cookies, outside of developer supervision. My hunch is that the only numbers that really matter are sales.

As for why the sales aren't happening, so long as functionality is as it should be on all devices, then you have to dig deeper, to the knowledge level that only someone that has worked the showroom floor understands. Really, a website should be the sales person's knowledge condensed into HTML. Yet nobody asks the guy serving customers what they upsell or what product they recommend if a customer baulks at a given product. Instead we have mystery-meat AI scripts that manage these things.

Thanks for the heads up on ad fraud, normally I am a long way from that due to internal scraping efforts being far more damaging to website performance, and, as a developer, page load times matter to me far more than how much was paid for the traffic.