The Biggest Mistakes People Make When Starting an E-commerce Site and How to Avoid Them |
Posted: March 9, 2018 |
Making your own website is not difficult anymore and as a result of that, thousands of e-commerce sites are launched each year, but most of them do not make it. It would be wrong to assume that every site that fails, does so just because they made obvious mistakes, since there are other unpredictable factors at play as well that can ruin both new and established online businesses. Nevertheless, a large number of e-commerce sites that do not make it, usually make very big and common mistakes. In case you are a rising entrepreneur looking to launch an e-commerce site yourself, read on to know about the biggest blunders that one can make and how to avoid them. Too Much Too FastLeEco is a multibillion dollar mostly-online company from China that showed great promise and was at one point, actually turning into a global business to reckon with in the smartphone and TV segment. However, as admitted by the company’s head honchos later, they got ruined because they tried to do too much too fast. The lesson here is to keep things growing at a steady rate which you can control because if that can happen to a billion-dollar company, it can happen to anybody. Not Starting with a Customer Service Department and PolicyIt doesn’t matter what you are selling online, you need to have a customer service department for your customers to lodge complaints with, as and when required. Even if the products you are selling are covered by company warranty, you do still have a degree of responsibility towards your customers in case they receive a faulty product, or something goes wrong with the overall experience of shopping on the site. In addition to having a dedicated customer service department, there should be a clear return/refund policy in place as well. When you are starting out, reputation is everything and bad or absent customer service is an assured way to ruin it. Poor Product Descriptions and ImagesOnline shoppers cannot actually see the product or experience it in any tangible manner on an e-commerce site, so detailed descriptions regarding the products, accompanied by helpful, clear and high-resolution images from multiple angles are a must. It’s hard to suggest what you should include in the product description without knowing what kind of products we are talking about, but manufacturing technique, materials used, and all its features usually qualify as necessary details. Slow or Costly ShippingWhen a customer has already paid for something online they expect to receive their product as soon as possible, irrespective of their location. Of course, it cannot be expected that every place in the world will get delivery at the same pace, but if it’s too slow, then those customers will probably not be buying from you again. Shipping costs can also deter customers if they are too high and are one of the prime reasons as to why they abandon their carts. Strike deals with more than one delivery company and try to offer free shipping whenever possible. Include free delivery with a low-cost membership program which will keep you from suffering a loss on delivery charges and offer them one more incentive to shop with you in the future at the same time. Absence of a Reliable Conversion Optimization ProcessWe just discussed one of the reasons as to why customers leave their carts just before checking out in the point above, but there are so many others. This is why it’s a mistake to not employ ecommerce conversion optimization software like OptinMonster to increase sales and reduce cart abandonments. It also helps in retargeting those potential customers and growing your email list; all of which together, help with expanding your business, reaching out to more target customers and of course, improving sales numbers. Slow and Tedious Checkout ProcessesImpulse buyers may change their decision to make a purchase if you make them go through too many hoops during the checkout procedure, so “checkout as guest” is a must have option on that page. Even careful buyers may become fed up with a complicated checkout procedure if it goes on for too long, so make it as concise as possible and ensure that the site is saving tedious bits of information such as the shipping address and the card number automatically. Bad Search Engine IntegrationThe importance of the on-site search engine cannot be stressed upon enough. There’s a reason why Alibaba and Amazon have invested so much in developing an internal search engine for their site that works so well. Customers will make minor spelling mistakes and sometimes, they will search for products that you are just not selling. A good search engine should not only be able to correct those typos automatically, but it should also show in-stock alternatives to what the customer searched for. A poorly optimized search engine on the other hand, will return no results even when the customers are searching for something that you actually have! Needless to say, that can be devastating for any site. Also, provide your visitors with the additional, relevant options for filtering their searches so that they can narrow down on exactly the products that they are looking for. Absence of a Strong Social Media PresenceIn an online world dominated by social media apps on smartphones, it’s foolish to think that you can make it without investing some significant resources into social media marketing. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Pinterest can be and should be utilized to their full extent. However, if you have products that can be tested and reviewed by popular social media influencers on YouTube, do that by all means and get them to endorse your site. A Site That’s Made for Computers OnlyIt’s 2018, so in case you are still going to launch an e-commerce site that works well only on a desktop or a laptop, but not quite so on smartphones and tablets, it’s just an outdated move that makes no sense whatsoever. More people surf the net and shop on their portable devices such as smartphones and tablets than on anything else, so your site needs to be mobile friendly. Launching an app for your site is a great idea, but even then, your site needs to support mobile devices and support them well. Poor SEOYou can get everything on this list right and yet suffer from low traffic all the same if you have poor search engine optimization. The internet has millions of websites and there’s a good chance that whatever you are selling is the same thing that a thousand others are trying to sell to your customers as well. While keeping the points already mentioned in your mind will help you stand out from the rest of the competition, they do still need to find you first! This why you need a solid plan to constantly optimize all your content with popular search engines such as Bing and the almighty Google, so that the content ends up on top of SERPs. Note that that this is not a comprehensive list, because there are just so many other things which could potentially go wrong, but as long as you check the mistakes mentioned here off your list, your chances of succeeding on your new venture into e-commerce should increase significantly.
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