Common mistakes in ecommerce

Businesses want to make money when it comes to using ecommerce. After all, ecommerce leads to more sales and can help a business gain customers. However, if you’re not careful with your email marketing, social media marketing, and other aspects of ecommerce, you can lose sales.

If your ecommerce sales drop, you might fall for one of these six most common mistakes.

1. Poor Design

Businesses need to consider their design and style when it comes to ecommerce channels. If your website, emails, or other channels don’t have a nice design, people will go to a competitor instead. Some businesses may think this is an over exaggeration, but the statistics don’t lie.

Three-out-of-four customers will judge your credibility based on your web design and nearly 19-out-of-20 will base their first impression on the design. If your business doesn’t have an appealing design, then you could lose potential customers. Make sure to create a design that looks nice while keeping the process easy for your customers.

2. Bad User Experience

A user’s experience can greatly affect his or her opinion of a website and business. The easier you make it for your customers to use your ecommerce channels, the more likely they will return to your business. However, you could see these points happens if they have bad experiences.

• View your business as unprofessional.
• Form a negative opinion of your business.
• Go to a competitor instead.

If your customers consistently have bad user experiences, then you should make some changes to your processes. Some businesses may overlook this common ecommerce mistake because they assume that the customer is wrong. Don’t make this assumption and focus on improving the experiences of your users.

3. Poor Return Policies

Customers want you to give them a positive experience that protects them if they aren’t satisfied. Some companies may not allow a good enough return policy for customers. If your business does this, then customers may feel that your company wants to “cheat” them out of money since they can’t get their money back when they face issues.

This can go beyond just broken products since other issues and concerns can arise. Make sure that you provide an effective return policy that gives customers a fair amount of time to return a product. This will keep them happy and work as an effective ecommerce strategy to have them return to your business.

4. Your Product Needs Improvements

You need to be honest with yourself: your product might not meet the needs of your customers. This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad product, but it does mean that you should make adjustments so that you can stand out from competitors. Ask yourself these questions to see how you can improve your product.

• What can I give my customers that my competitors don’t give?
• What problems do my products have that turn customers away?
• What can I improve about my products that customers would want?

As you meet their needs and give them the products that they want, customers will return to your business.

5. No Live Chat

Many businesses underestimate the effectiveness of live chat rooms for customers to interact with employees. This allows customers to get quick answers and solutions for their questions and problems. However, if you don’t provide a live chat, then customers can only receive that help through emails, phone calls, or visiting your store.

You take away a common channel that customers like to use to communicate with a business if you don’t use live chat. It gives them a quick and easy way to discuss issues with your business, so customers appreciate it when you provide this option. It will help you to prevent low sales since customers know that they can rely on you for answers.

You can take step forward and even include SMS marketing strategies in communication.

6. No Email Marketing

You may feel that you don’t need to use email marketing because people mostly use social media today. While social media continues to grow, email remains an important part of ecommerce.

You miss out on various benefits when you don’t use email marketing in your ecommerce strategy. As stated in the image, email marketing provides customers incentives, reminds them about your brands, and helps them make a purchase. Make sure to incorporate email marketing to improve your sales.

7. Final Points

Businesses sometimes overlook weaknesses in their ecommerce strategy and those weaknesses can affect their sales. If you notice your sales drop, look into these common mistakes. As you avoid them and seek to improve your business, you can bring your sales back up and continue to increase them.