Streamlining Website Infrastructure and User Experience

As we continue to dive into the new year, it’s the perfect time to focus on building a strong ecommerce foundation to position your business for long-term success. At Irish Titan, we know scaling an ecommerce business comes with unique challenges—and we’re here to guide you through them with confidence.

This February, we’re zeroing in on the essentials: optimizing user experience, prioritizing accessibility, enhancing customer support systems, and streamlining shipping and fulfillment processes. By addressing these core elements now, you’ll not only drive growth but also deliver an exceptional customer experience throughout the year. But why focus on these specific areas? Because they work together to create a robust, future-ready ecommerce platform.

• Enhancing your website experience: Boost customer retention, improve conversions, differentiate your brand, and ensure accessibility.
• Optimizing performance: Achieve faster load times, better mobile responsiveness, enhanced SEO, and scalable growth.
• Streamlining operations: Simplify processes, cut costs, enable smarter decision-making, and foster stronger partner collaboration.

By building a foundation rooted in user experience, performance, and operational efficiency, you’re not just keeping up—you’re setting the stage for sustained success in an ever-evolving ecommerce landscape.

Let’s break it down into actionable steps to help you get started!

1. Evaluate User Experience and Site Performance

A seamless and intuitive website is essential for attracting and retaining customers. Start by auditing key aspects of your user experience and site performance:

• Enhance Design: Ensure your site is easy to navigate, with clear calls to action and an intuitive user flow. Simplify wherever possible to make the shopping experience straightforward and enjoyable.
• Fix Broken Links: Use tools to identify and repair broken links or error pages, which can frustrate users and harm your search engine rankings.
• Improve Speed: Test and optimize your website’s load time and responsiveness. A fast site is critical for handling high traffic, especially before promotions or sales events.

2. Implement Accessibility Improvements

Accessibility isn’t just a legal requirement; it’s a business imperative. Make your website welcoming to all users by addressing common accessibility barriers.

• Audit Accessibility: Using auditing tools or your own evaluation, perform a comprehensive audit of the accessibility on your website to ensure that your site is accessible to people with disabilities that complies with WCAG standards.
  • For Akamai Technologies, they weren't aware of how much they were overlooking accessibility until they received their score from using Siteimprove’s tools. By using the recommendations from Site Improves audit, Akamai was able to improve their websites accessibility by 20%
  • Using Siteimprove's tools, OpenReach was able to detect and also resolve pain points they didn't know were occurring on their website. They also use the ongoing metrics that Siteimprove provides to continuously improve their website and work toward WCAG compliance
  • For Cuisinart, their partnership with Siteimprove revealed that they had 45 major website issues. Within 8 months they were able to cut it down to 9 and continue to maintain continuous progress toward WCAG compliance to enhance accessibility and user experience.
• Fix Issues: Address problems like poor color contrast, missing alt text, and inaccessible navigation to enhance usability for everyone.
  • Openreach boosted their QA score from 76.2% to an impressive 97% by enhancing readability, refreshing content, and addressing errors.
  • With Siteimprove Prepublish, Akamai Technologies streamlines content checks directly within AEM. This automation enables the team to catch more errors efficiently, eliminating the need to leave the CMS or manually review content and source code.
  • Cuisinart's website accessibility scores rapidly surpassed benchmarks, enabling the team to leverage Siteimprove for sustaining these improvements.The outcome is a more inclusive, user-friendly web experience that reinforces Cuisinart’s position as an industry leader.
• Update Accessibility Policy: Ensure your accessibility policy is clear, up-to-date, and easy for users to find on your site.

There other partner within the accessibility space that we at Irish Titan lean on as well is accessiBe.

3. Enhance Customer Support Systems

Exceptional customer support fosters loyalty and builds trust. Optimize your support channels to deliver faster, more effective assistance.

• Audit Support Channels: Audit and review your channels to ensure all communication channels are integrated and functioning.
• Automate Responses: Implement or update automated responses for common inquiries to reduce manual time and provide accurate/timely information to your customers. This could include order status, product availability, shipping questions, etc. This will help reduce response time and improve overall customer experience.
  • Alohas implemented quick response flows into their chat widget with buttons using the Automation Add-On feature in Gorgias, directing customers to most common questions to provide instant answers, and spark more meaningful conversations.
  • Psycho bunny implemented Gorgias AI agent to handle those simple, and repetitive questions such as order status, return & exchanges, and shipping.

Jenny Yan, Strategic Partner Manager from Gorgias says "Gorgias is driving the next evolution of Conversational AI for ecommerce. Unlike industry-agnostic AI tools, Gorgias’s Conversational AI integrates seamlessly with the ecommerce tech stack, enabling it to understand each merchant’s unique store, processes, tools, and customers to power personalized 1-to-1 conversations.

In 2025, Gorgias will continue to offer AI-powered tools for scalable customer support while expanding its toolset for ecommerce marketers. Here's a preview of what’s on the roadmap: AI Support Agent on new channels: Instantly address questions and issues via email, chat, and beyond.

AI Support Agent integrations with dozens of new tools: Enable AI to update orders, manage subscriptions, streamline returns, and more.

AI Insights: Provide brands with actionable insights into why customers are having issues and how to address them.

AI Sales Agent: Drive sales by engaging, converting, and retaining customers through 1:1 personalized interactions… and more AI tools to help ecommerce teams automate costly tasks and grow their brands through the power of conversation.”

• Maintain Knowledge Base: If you don't already have one, set up a self-service knowledge base to quickly help customers resolve common issues quickly and test it to ensure it is providing the correct and helpful information for customers to solve issues on their own.

  • Brumate uses a customer centric approach by directly addressing key questions at the top of their knowledge base using Gorgias. They want to push people towards the resources in their help center to help customers self-solve. Though the chat bubble is readily available for their customers to use.
  • Alohas also uses the same approach that Brumate does by featuring top questions at the top of the page so customers don't have to scroll by utilizing tools and guidance through the Gorgias platform.
  • Santa Cruz Bicycles is using Hubspot’s service hub features to implement more self service options to their customers to give their employees more time to focus on continuing to make the customers experience better.

• Test Workflows: Review your processes for handling inquiries, refunds, exchanges, and returns to ensure they’re efficient and customer-friendly.

4. Optimize Shipping Experience and Fulfillment Processes

Shipping and fulfillment are make-or-break aspects of the customer experience. Streamline these operations to enhance satisfaction and efficiency:

• Simplify Shipping Options: Ensure that customers can view and select their preferred shipping method at checkout while enabling real-time shipping rate calculations and delivery updates also available at checkout
  • With a dedication to customer experience, Revelry implemented ShipperHQ to ensure their customers can be confident of the arrival of their product before they even place their order. They did so through the order and date features along with same day shipping cut off times.
  • Clean Eatz ships perishable items meaning that it's important that the customer knows their expected delivery date before they checkout. By implementing Shipper HQ’s delivery date logic they could set delivery expectations for their customers before they check out.

Andrea Sanders, Partner Marketing Manager at ShipperHQ shares her thoughts “A customer-friendly shipping experience at checkout isn't just a nice-to-have. It's a critical factor in driving sales and maximizing profitability. Today's shoppers want more than basic shipping options. They expect free shipping choices, convenient pickup alternatives, and crystal-clear delivery dates. The right shipping experience speeds up checkout and reduces cart abandonment by offering compelling incentives like free shipping and in-store pickup—all while protecting your profit margin

With ShipperHQ, merchants can increase sales and preserve profitability by taking full control of the shipping experience at checkout. You can:

• Offer competitive live rates via 50+ carrier integrations (including LTL freight), along with advanced features like multi-carrier and multi-origin logic, dimensional packing, and rate shopping
• Show precise delivery dates based on your specific lead times, cut-off times, and blackout days across every carrier, warehouse, and product group
• Create customized shipping rules that automatically display options aligned with your operational requirements and pricing strategy.

ShipperHQ is a UPS Ready® Premier Partner and integrates with over 50 carriers, including LTL freight. Connect seamlessly to all your carrier services to streamline fulfillment and provide reliable, cost-effective shipping.

By optimizing the shipping experience at checkout, businesses can reduce cart abandonment, grow sales, and increase profitability.”

• Optimize Costs: Offer competitive, real-time shipping rates while protecting your margins.
  • Moxi Roller Skates was taking a significant loss on shipping. With implementing ShipperHQ they were able to use multiple features such as dimensional packing and best fit algorithm to significantly lower their shipping losses and pull rates that are much more accurate and reliable.
  • Clean Eatz uses ShipperHQ’s UPS Ready program through their certified UPS vendor certification to have easy access to accurate UPS delivery dates/times and their negotiated UPS rates directly in the ShipperHQ platform
• Ensure Timely Delivery: Check your fulfillment processes to ensure orders are processed and shipped on time to meet your customers expectations.
  • Jenis Ice Cream implemented Shipper HQ’s delivery date logic to help them calculate delivery dates to help save their ice cream from thawing. Along with implementing multi-warehouse fulfillment logic so they could retrieve rates from multiple fulfillment locations.
• Automate Processes: Automate labels, tracking, and notifications to manage shipping efficiently and keep customers informed.
  • Clean Cause automated their shipping by implementing ShipStations to avoid human error and save time resulting in them only needing one to tow full time employees to fulfill orders
  • Mighty Club was facing a huge barrier to success at that time. They were not efficiently fulfilling orders due to the manual entry they were having to do. By implementing ShipStation, the mighty club was able to automate and optimize fulfillment through 3PL services resulting in them being able to handle higher order volume
  • Canadian Spa Co. was manually entering orders into different couriers and shipping every single order manually prior to Veeqo entering the picture. By implementing Veeqo they were able to ship orders all from one place, giving them more control of what was being shipped out and what was in those orders.

Wrapping It Up: Build a Foundation for Growth

As we continue to kick off the year, remember: sustainable ecommerce success starts with a strong foundation. By auditing and optimizing these critical areas, you’ll position your business for growth that’s scalable, strategic, and customer-focused.

We know these tasks can feel daunting, but you’re not alone. At Irish Titan, we’re here to help you lay the groundwork, check the right boxes, and grow smarter and bolder. So let’s continue to roll up our sleeves and make this year one of your best yet.