Are you facing problems with your eCommerce store? Are you experiencing high cart abandonment rates, low traffic, or low conversion rates despite spending big on marketing?
Well, good news! You came to the right place. We will help you get the best out of your online store by pointing out the mistakes you might be making in your eCommerce game.
Let’s cut to the chase: Despite the minimal entry barriers to eCommerce, running a successful web store is more challenging than you think. E-commerce isn’t as easy as setting up a web store and waiting for profits to roll in. Thriving in this sector isn’t a piece of cake.
You would be surprised to know that 80% of businesses fail in the eCommerce industry. Twenty-five percent of companies fail in the first year alone. You may be wondering why a sector that boasts around 18% share in global retail sales has such a low success rate.
Well, it all boils down to the volatility of the retail sector.
The cut-throat competition in the e-commerce space paves the way for customers to find accessible alternatives, making it difficult for brands to succeed in this sector. Apart from the competition, several factors account for online business mistakes, which we will discuss later in this article.
So, what steps should you take to run a successful online store? For starters, you can avoid the eCommerce mistakes most store owners make while running their web store. Trust us when we say this: even the most prominent e-commerce players make the silliest mistakes. So don’t panic—you aren’t alone in this.
This article will focus on some critical eCommerce mistakes people make and how to avoid them.
ECommerce Mistakes That Kill Startups
1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience
Most people start with an idea, create a product and then sell it. You may wonder, what’s so wrong with that, isn’t that how it is supposed to be?
Not really. They forget the most important part- Research.
Researching your target audience should be the priority while mapping out your eCommerce strategy. The last thing you want to do is sell a product that doesn’t resonate with your target market.
Market research allows you to identify and understand the needs of your target audience. It helps you answer questions like– Does your product have a demand in the market? What brand message would relate to your prospects? Which marketing channels should you use to reach your customers?
Identifying your target audience helps you build buyer personas according to which you can tailor your product and your brand’s message. It saves you from business catastrophes by ensuring that your products are well differentiated, and your marketing efforts align with your brand’s goals.
Now that you know why researching your target audience is important, let’s get to the execution part.
Research isn’t rocket science. It’s just you trying to identify and understand your prospects. Data is available everywhere, and you can start as simple as going through search engines, social media groups, forums, etc. Another great way to get customer insights is to review customers’ feedback on your web store.
If you are operating on a larger scale, you can go for more complex methods like- surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
Your research should cover the following target market information:
- Demographics
- Customers Buying Behaviour
- Interests
- Geographic
Learn more about research methods to optimize your research efforts.
2. Choosing the Wrong eCommerce Platform
We aren’t exaggerating, but an eCommerce platform can make or break your business. All eCommerce platforms aren’t the same. If you aren’t careful while selecting, you might end up paying for a platform with only basic features and no scope for updates.
Before selecting an eCommerce platform, you must thoroughly research all available options and consult existing store owners or eCommerce experts to get the best idea. Picking the wrong platform adds unnecessary expenses as it would require updates or migration to a more efficient platform.
Migrations and updates may sometimes lead to loss of data and security. You can consult eCommerce experts to transition to a new platform seamlessly. While selecting an eCommerce platform, you have to consider the following factors:
- Your budget
- Your product catalog
- Ability to customize
- Scalability of your business
- Integrations
- Security
Select a platform that is flexible with changes in your plans. Your eCommerce platform should adapt to your business needs and grow with your business. The last thing you need is an eCommerce platform limiting your store’s growth.
3. Not Focusing on SEO and CRO
Too many eCommerce brands rely on PPC and social media channels to promote themselves and their products. Most of these companies overlook the two critical aspects of creating and improving online presence; yes! We are talking about SEO and CRO.
Implementing SEO in eCommerce websites can be challenging. You have to tailor your content to your customers’ needs from an SEO point of view. The problem is the lack of rankable content, as most of the content on your website is product descriptions and specifications.
So, what can you do to rank higher organically?
Start by writing copy that answers your target audiences’ questions, responds to their needs, resonates with search engine algorithms, and entices website visitors to purchase your products. Optimize your product pages according to your customer’s search intent. You can also create a section for blogs on your website to increase the amount of rankable content.
SEO and CRO go hand in hand. While SEO focuses on increasing traffic to your website, CRO seeks to increase conversions by getting more visitors to take action, such as signing up for your newsletter, completing a contact form, or making a purchase. CRO enables you to increase the conversion rate of SEO traffic to your website.
SEO and CRO are two cornerstones of an eCommerce business. You can implement them on your own or use eCommerce marketing experts’ help. Either way, it is important to prioritize both of these aspects while mapping out your marketing strategy.
4. Poor Product Pages
Product pages are the most important pages in your web store. It gives prospects information about your product. Product pages need to be persuasive while listing down all the critical features of your product.
So how will you know if you have a poorly written product page? The more important question is, how do you improve it?
eCommerce brands often make the mistake of not providing ample information about their products which can lead to confusion among customers. This includes using product images that don’t showcase the products, low-quality product images, content lacking product specifications, and poorly written product descriptions.
A poor product page will result in high bounce rates, ultimately decreasing your sales. You must carefully lay out your product pages so that your customers don’t miss out on any relevant information.
Visuals are an essential part of any eCommerce business. As customers cannot physically see or feel your products, they are primarily influenced by product images and user reviews on your product page. Make sure you use product images that showcase your products from every angle. This enables your customers to get a visual depiction of your product.
Another mistake store owners make is seeking help from their suppliers to fill up their product pages. This often results in similar product descriptions among competing websites with the same supplier. It will be challenging to outperform your competition if your product descriptions are the same as theirs and they have more website authority than you.
A good product description should be succinct, visually appealing, and provide all the necessary details for a customer to decide whether to purchase the item.
5. Not Conducting a Website Audit
Over time, your website’s health might deteriorate if it isn’t maintained and monitored thoroughly. A website audit helps you to identify and analyze all factors related to a website’s performance, security, and overall health.
A website audit is a critical factor in determining the success of an eCommerce business by ensuring your website is up and running seamlessly. Yet, many store owners choose to ignore it.
Skipping a website audit is a big no, especially for eCommerce websites where security, performance, and health are significant factors affecting sales. Customers will exit your website if they experience slow loading speeds or feel unsafe while shopping on a website.
Ignoring the health of your store might result in downsite on days with high traffic. As an eCommerce business, you definitely wouldn’t want to miss out on huge chunks of sales on days like Black Friday, Halloween, and Christmas. Would you? Regular audits help you identify early issues that might cause downsite, ensuring your website is up and running daily.
eCommerce websites can often be extremely complex; you must be extra careful while performing an audit. You can always conduct a website audit yourself, although, for eCommerce stores, we recommend opting for site audit specialists so that your store doesn’t break because of unwarranted changes.
6. Your Store isn’t Mobile-friendly
Mobile devices have completely changed the eCommerce landscape in recent years. With the evolution of technology, mobile devices can now execute complex tasks and have slowly started to replace wired devices. Users can now shop at any time of the day without the hassle of fixing themselves to one place.
Your store needs to be mobile-friendly! Websites that aren’t compatible with mobile devices face a severe drop in traffic; from an eCommerce perspective, a company will experience a decline in sales as most online shoppers are mobile users these days. To check if your store is mobile-friendly or not, you can use the “Google mobile-friendly test.”
Make sure your website is optimized for smaller screen sizes. You can develop native mobile applications or build a PWA (Progressive Web Apps) to make sure your customers have alternatives to shopping on the website.
Apart from ensuring mobile compatibility, make sure you develop dedicated strategies for mobile users. You can read our article 10 Mobile Commerce Strategies To Promote Your Business In 2022 to get more insights on how to craft the perfect strategy for mobile users.
7. Not Using Web Analytics
You might be doing everything right, from developing the perfect eCommerce website to implementing the ideal marketing strategy, yet you aren’t getting desired results. This might be due to the absence of analytics.
Web analytics tools offer various options to collect and analyze relevant data from your campaigns. Analytics enables you to track the performance of your business efforts allowing you to change aspects of your campaign that aren’t working.
Most eCommerce platforms provide web analytics tools to facilitate seamless tracking of customer data. You can also use third-party tools like Google Analytics to optimize your store even further.
Your online store might get a significant competitive advantage over rivals by using analytics. Analytics can predict what’s in store for you! Inspecting data collected from these tools sheds light on customer behavior, enabling you to find trends and patterns which you can use to improve your marketing efforts.
8. Lack of Payment and Shipping Options
Today, customers have a variety of payment options to choose from. Different people prefer different options. Some might prefer transactions through credit cards, while others prefer online payment modes like Paypal.
It is crucial to have a variety of payment options on your checkout page to ensure customers don’t exit because their preferred payment mode is missing. Lack of payment and shipping options account for a significant number of cart abandonment cases. Fortunately, eCommerce platforms with dedicated CMS support multiple payment options. You might also consider including popular payment options like Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) and EMI options to decrease bounce and cart abandonment rates.
Similarly, you should also provide a variety of shipping options. You might be using multiple shipping companies to deliver your products. Because different shipping companies have different delivery schedules, users should be able to choose how quickly they want their purchases delivered.
Free shipping is no longer a competitive advantage, as almost every eCommerce store currently provides free shipping. Try implementing a variety of shipping options and dates to gain a competitive advantage. Provide faster delivery options. In today’s market, where individuals lack patience, choices like one-day delivery are growing in popularity.
9. Underwhelming User Experience
Have you ever felt confused while shopping on a website? This is because of poor user experience. Underwhelming UX can result in a significant drop in conversions and can drastically increase bounce rates. User experience is directly related to the purchasing experience. Most of your customers will exit your store if the buying process is long and complicated. To avoid this, you must focus on providing the best UX to your visitors.
User experience isn’t just limited to a single aspect. It is the overall experience a user has on your website. You can improve your store’s UX by focusing on the following aspects:
- Improve Navigation: Your store might have the best products, but it’s no good if users cannot find them. Make your pages easily accessible to users by adding them to your website’s menu. Additionally, customers might have queries related to product specifications, transaction details, or refund status. Include a FAQs section in your product pages.
- Categorize your products: Categorizing products enables visitors to navigate the website easily. It also influences visitors to look into products they originally didn’t intend to.
- Optimize Checkout Page: Checkout Page Optimization is a great way to improve conversions while reducing bounce rates. Instead of optimizing the front end of your store to drive people down the sales funnel, try optimizing your checkout page to increase conversions. You can learn more about Checkout Page Optimization strategies by clicking here.
- Include Guest Checkouts: Online shoppers generally have a short attention span. Particularly for customers who prefer to make a one-time purchase; they don’t want to go through the laborious procedure of creating an account in order to make a purchase. Offer guest checkouts to enable visitors to have a hassle-free shopping experience.
10. Poor Customer Service
This is a common mistake online retailers make, and it’s a costly one. Offering attractive discounts, faster delivery dates, and exceptional products will not always guarantee success, especially if your customer service is poor.
A poor customer service team is a disaster waiting to happen. Slow response times, delayed actions, and inappropriate behavior from your team might be fatal to your company’s reputation. You would gradually lose your current customers and slowly start to lose out on acquiring new ones.
Let’s get one thing straight, you cant satisfy each and every customer. No matter how exceptional your service is, there will be people who are unhappy. To get the best possible results, you must deploy a strong customer service team to ensure that most customer queries get resolved.
If you are low on budget and cannot afford a full-fledged customer service team, consider using chatbots to answer people’s questions. Chatbots are fast and effective in responding to customer queries. If you already have a customer service team, you can also use chatbots as the first layer to filter out customer questions. This way, queries that can be easily answered are handled by the bots, helping your customer service agents get a breather.
eCommerce Mistakes: Wrapping Up
In such a volatile market, mistakes are bound to happen. Some might seem minute, but these mistakes can be fatal if ignored over time. Most errors are harmless, but your business is bound to suffer if you continue to make the same mistakes.
The best way to identify eCommerce mistakes is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Your business is centered around your customers; any tiny discrepancy between your ideas and customer expectations can prove critical. Try to develop customer-centric strategies.
eCommerce success isn’t an overnight thing. The competitive retail space doesn’t make it easy for businesses to attain quick success. To thrive in this sector, you must consistently keep up with numerous competing firms. Avoiding the eCommerce mistakes mentioned in the article will help you narrow down your room for error and gain a competitive advantage over the long run.
