7 Common eCommerce Mistakes to Avoid When Selling Online

eCommerce has changed how we shop and do business. It also gives us opportunities that never existed before, no matter if we are small-time entrepreneurs or an established retailer.

With such opportunities, comes the challenge that would make or break your online store.

If you are an online seller, then you know how often the eCommerce landscape seems to change. What works today may not work tomorrow. Staying on top of all the changes is almost a full-time job in itself.

But no need to panic about that, because we have put together this article on the 7 common eCommerce mistakes not to make while selling online. Whether you’re new to the game or have been running your store for a while, partnering with one of the best ecommerce development company can help you navigate these changes effectively and avoid common pitfalls.

7 Common eCommerce Mistakes to Avoid

1 - Slow & Low Website Speed & Poor Performance

Today, if your website is a page that takes a long time to load, guess what? You are just losing customers before they even get a chance to see what you have to offer.

Think of your last few online shopping experiences.

How long would you wait for a page to load? It has to be a matter of seconds if you're like most people.

On one hand, research studies have even revealed that 40 percent of visitors will leave a website if takes more than 3 seconds to load. It is a huge number of potential customers walking away before seeing your products!

Further, slower page loads will have a knock-on effect throughout your eCommerce business. In other words, search engines such as Google take site speed into account when ranking pages. Therefore, it could be that your slow website is impacting your discovery in search.

To address these issues effectively, consider white label marketing services that offer website optimization solutions, ensuring your site performs at its best and ranks higher.

Instead, when you build your website with speed and performance in mind, you are not just creating a better user experience, but the foundation for higher conversion rates and a better search engine rank.

Luckily for you, you can use tools to identify issues on your site. Google's PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix are great starting places.

These will run through your website and provide very specific recommendations on how to improve.

2 — Low-Quality Product Photography

Do you know that there is a saying, "A picture speaks a thousand words?" Right?

In eCommerce, it might speak a thousand sales. Most of your customers cannot be able to touch or see your products in person; hence your product photos become their eyes and hands.

Research has found that the best product photography may improve conversion rates by up to 30%.

Of course, low-quality product photography is a sure turnoff, thus inflating the loss of sales and harming your brand.

Think about your online shopping habits. 

What's the first thing you notice when scrolling over products while searching? Do you believe it's the price? The description? No. It's the image.

Not everyone, however, has the capability or the budget to create professional-looking pictures, and AI tools can be a game-changer. Deep-image.ai, for one, has developed this powerful tool for enhancing product photographs.

With Deep Image, you can automatically enhance the quality of your product photos, and leave all of your catalog consistent. Sharpen images, brighten up images, or remove the background altogether or even generate completely new ones. Tool and process will make sure your products are presented from their “best angle”, with a professional shine to them.

This can come in pretty handy if you conduct lots of business with suppliers whose image quality varies.

3 — Inadequate Product Descriptions

Imagine this: you have seen something that catches your fancy online, but as you scroll down to get more details, the description is brief, and in one sentence. How frustrating is that?

This happens all too often in eCommerce sites, and that is a surefire way to scare potential customers away.

In e-selling, detailed and accurate information regarding the product is very essential because a customer using an online platform cannot lift the product, feel its texture, or request additional information from a salesperson as they would when buying in a physical store.

Your product description should fill this gap to give your customer all the information needed in making a purchase decision.

Another aspect not to forget when writing product descriptions is SEO. Even though you write primarily for your customers, it's also useful to include relevant keywords in them, because that's how your products will appear in a search engine's results.

Again, your description is your salesperson: it's going out there and giving people a reason to buy, day or night. So don't rush through the job of crafting informative, interesting, and persuasive descriptions.

4 — Complicated Checkout Process

Your customer walks into your store, roams around a bit, finds something they like, and adds it to their cart. Check. Not so fast.

It isn't complete in the eyes of the customer until the order is done. And one of the biggest obstacles to that order is a complex checkout process.

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest issues in eCommerce, with averages at around 70%. It means that out of 10 people who begin a checkout process, 7 of them will leave without completing their purchase.

Cart abandonment has many causes. Among the most common is a difficult checkout, and that is one of the easiest to fix.

A few ways you can make your checkout on your eCommerce site run more smoothly include the provision of a guest checkout or even an offer to let customers who wish to purchase not be required to set up an account.

Though getting customers to create accounts can provide the potential for further marketing, not offering them this choice initially, before completing a purchase, can be a pretty big turn-off.

Alternatively, if you are not planning to accommodate the guest checkout feature, you could minimize the number of fields required in the form and request only the information that has to be filled up. The fewer the fields, the more reluctant the customer would likely be to get frustrated and leave his or her cart.

The third and most important one is to offer multiple payment options. The more payment methods you offer, the more likely the customer will find one that suits them. Offering credit card payments, PayPal, Apple Pay, and other popular payment types is usually recommended.

Last but not least, you can include a progress bar to show the customer at what step in the checkout process he is. This could help ease anxiety on a longer checkout and thus reduce abandonment rates.

5 — Neglecting Customer Service

It's easy to lose sight of the human aspect of running an online shop when it's all to do with the technicalities. You are dealing with real people rather than faceless internet users; they have questions, concerns, and sometimes problems.

This is where customer service comes into play, and not paying attention to it can cost a small fortune.

Good customer service can turn one-time customers into regular customers, while bad service can lose you and sales can give you negative reviews of the future.

Words of bad experience spread very fast on social media, and it can damage the reputation of your brand.

Fortunately, there are a few strategies that you can implement to enhance your customer service game.

For example, you can offer live chat support that would enable customers to get instant answers to any question they may have. Believe it or not, this can make or break the sale. It is surprising how many would prefer chat & phone as an option because it is fast and convenient.

Besides the live chat support, you should design a comprehensive FAQ page or section on your eCommerce website. You do this because most of the customer inquiries are repetitive.

Thus, every time you create a comprehensive FAQ page or section, you would have addressed general questions ahead of time and, therefore, saved time for you and your customers.

Customer feedback solutions can help you identify areas where you can improve your customer service and create a more positive experience."

6 — Ignoring SEO and Content Marketing

Unless you are on top of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content marketing, you are missing an enormous chance to gain organic traffic to your website and set up your brand as an authority within your niche.To ensure you're maximizing this opportunity, it's crucial to hire SEO experts who can develop and implement the right strategies to boost your online visibility and drive long-term success.

Think about it: how does most of your online buying start?

Typically with a Google search. If your products aren't showing up in these searches, then you're invisible to this huge pool of potential customers. That's why SEO comes into play.

Optimizing means that, through SEO, your products and pages will be able to rank higher in search engine results, thus increasing their chances of being found by potential customers; optimizing means tweaking your product titles, descriptions, and images with keyword relevance, and making sure that your site structure is also friendly toward search engines.

However, the reach of keywords/technical optimizations has only been so far. Content marketing plays a significant role here too. To maximize your digital marketing efforts, partnering with reliable content marketing agencies across the USA can be a game-changer. These agencies specialize in crafting high-quality, engaging content that enhances SEO efforts and resonates with your target audience.

When you create worthy, informative content about your products or industry, you can attract real customers who are searching for information on topics of specific interest, make your brand authoritative in your niche, improve search engine rankings, get your audience interested, and bring them again and again to your site.

This could be blog articles, how-to guides, product comparisons, or even video tutorials.

The idea here is to add value to your audience as you seamlessly integrate your products or services into the content.

SEO and Content Marketing - it is not a one-and-done approach. It is not a tweak a few things up here and just leave it there. You must keep producing and optimizing content. Monitor your rankings and adapt your strategy based on said rankings.

7 — Overlooking Data Analytics and Optimization

The last mistake eCommerce companies make is not analyzing their data and using those insights to then improve.

As much analytics is involved today, every click, view, and purchase results in a large amount of data. This type of wealth of information can shine a light on customer behavior, preferences, and pain points.

Some of the most relevant metrics to track include:

• Conversion rate
• Average order value
• Cart abandonment rate
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer lifetime value
• Traffic sources

You can get most of this information for free through tools like Google Analytics. Many eCommerce platforms also have built-in analytics tools.

Getting the information, though, is just half of the battle. The analysis is where things get interesting. This is how you can use that information to inform your decisions. It may mean changing the product line, modifying a website's design, or adjusting its marketing efforts.

For example, if your cart abandonment rate is through the roof, it's time to go back and revisit your checkout process. On products that have a low conversion rate, even though they get plenty of traffic, maybe your description or picture needs a little tweaking.

ECommerce is not a "set it and forget it" business. Chances are that the best online stores are those that regularly analyze, learn, and improve.

Conclusion

In short, by avoiding these seven eCommerce mistakes you can significantly enhance the performance and profitability of your online store.

Each of these areas poses challenges but also opportunities. So if you can overcome these common mistakes, you're not only avoiding mistakes, but you're creating a setting for success - a setting for which your online store might be set up.

eCommerce is a constantly changing field. What happens today might not even happen tomorrow, while what is new tomorrow is hopefully new enough to shake and change everything we know today. Hence, continuous learning for this industry is a must.