Running an ecommerce business is a marathon, not a sprint. Everyone nods at that. Then they spend their entire budget on the starting line.
The Budget Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
Launch with about 30% of your budget. Keep the rest for continuous improvement.
The reason is simple. Before you launch, every decision you make is a guess. You are guessing at what customers want, how they will navigate, what will stop them buying. After you launch, you have data. Real traffic, real heatmaps, real behaviour. That is the moment your money starts buying certainty instead of opinion.
If you have spent everything getting live, you arrive at the useful part of the process with nothing left to act on it.
Where the Remaining Budget Should Go
Put at least 10% of your marketing budget into conversion rate optimisation. Not because CRO is fashionable, but because it is the only spend that makes every other pound work harder. Paid traffic into a leaking store is just a faster way to lose money. I have shown before how the same traffic can produce dramatically more revenue once conversion is fixed.
And avoid the one-time big redesign. A full overhaul is a single enormous bet placed on your own taste. Gradual iteration based on what customers actually do is slower to talk about and far more likely to work.
Function Beats Decoration
Features that help someone decide quickly matter more than colours. Simplify navigation and filtering, because nobody has time to hunt. If you want a model for how to aggregate and filter product data well, look at Google Shopping and be honest about how much better it is than your category page.
None of this is exciting. That is rather the point. Start small, optimise continuously, and let customer behaviour make the decisions instead of the loudest person in the room.
If you want to argue about any of this with people who actually run stores, come to Ecommerce Camp.