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10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business



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10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business

When it comes to making mistakes in your eCommerce business, there can be many.  I've been working on websites for a long time and I know most of the common mistakes that one can make simply because I've done some of them myself and I've heard of people doing them lol.  Mistakes on an eCommerce website will happen, it's unavoidable, but fixing them in a timely manner before they take root and harm your business it what really matters.

You'll need to read up on the common practices of setting up an eCommerce website so that you don't fall into the same mistakes that a lot of us have done.  Some of the mistakes are pretty easy to spot while others may not be as obvious.

In this discussion I'm going to go over the 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business


Your contact info is hidden
When you're running a business you will want people to be able to trust you.  If you decide to hide your contact information then you're just making it more difficult for someone to call or email you, and that's never a good thing.  People will always have questions, so make sure your information is out there for the public.  Also, if you don't have it publicly viewable you can be sure that your adwords ads won't go live if you're tying out a PPC campaign 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business


Crappy Product Descriptions
When someone comes to your website they want to be shown the best of the best.  If your content is written like you don't care, then why should the people coming to your website purchase from you?  Having bad product descriptions just tells people you want their money and you don't want to invest time into your own website.  They will instantly think that your lack of effort to put proper content into your descriptions will carry over to how you run your business and that will push people away.  Also, people want information and not just images of the product.  Since they can't hold it in their hand you need to explain how large it is, how heavy it is, what it does exactly and how awesome it is overall.  Doing this will increase your sales, not doing this will make sure your competitor gets the sale lol


Bad Search Function
If you messed up your search function, or your programmer did, you need to get that bad boy up and running immediately.  I've been to plenty of websites and I tend to use the search bar before I even waste time looking for something.  If they search bar isn't functioning and it's throwing up a 404 page or some other error, I just leave the site because I know I'm going to run into another brick wall eventually since there was already one bad experience.  You want to keep everything working so that people don't act like me and leave at the first sign of a bad experience lol.  And the search function is one of those things that you basically set and forget.  It will work as long as your website is up and you don't have to worry about it, usually.


Long Process To Checkout
I can't tell you how many times I've abandoned a cart simply because I felt like I was jumping through hoops just to buy something.  I was on a website that literally kept trying to show me up-sells for roughly 5 click throughs to different pages before it showed me the "Checkout" button lol.  I mean come on, how hungry was this person for a sale that they needed to constantly show me up-sells and keep my from checking out?  I kept thinking that this person read an eBook which said up-sells were a good thing to do at checkout, which they are, but this person though "Well, if one page is good then 5 should be great!".  In reality the person was killing their own profits by annoying the people who were trying to checkout 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business


Low Quality Images
This gets me every time, and I'm not even a designer lol.  When I get to a website that is using poor quality images that are obviously taken from a phone or cropped out of a bigger image and stretched to fit into a section it shouldn't be in, I want to leave the page.  I never purchase from a store like this because I think that it's going to just be a poor quality service since they didn't even have the time to make their website look good.  I mean come on, it's not that difficult to figure out the size of the image you need and crop it in MS paint if you need to lol.  I'm not the only person who thinks this either, there are millions of people like me 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business


Not Enough Payment Options
When it comes to checking out, not everyone is going to want to use PayPal.  You will need to have plenty of payment options if you're going to capitalize on your traffic.  Think about it, you won't always get a sale if you just have PayPal as your payment option because people want to use their own credit or debit cards.  Sure they can use them within PayPal, but they usually don't because they aren't aware that they can.  If you give your users another option like Authorize.net then people can have the freedom to use whatever payment option they want and everyone is happier.  Well that is unless you are in a niche that is rampant with fraud, then people will use Authorize.net and file charge backs as soon as they get their items.


Excluding your TOS and Privacy Policy
With a lot of advertisers wanting only credible companies in their pool, you now need a clear cut TOS and Privacy Policy page that is easily accessible to everyone.  This is because places like Google Adwords wants you to be fully transparent and not hit your buyers with any secret terms that allows you to keep their money no matter what.  If you have a no refund policy, then it better be able to be seen by the public with one easy click. 


Forcing People To Register
When it comes to buying something online, forcing people to register gets pretty annoying.  So if you do need the to register in order to purchase, don't make it complicated and then they have to double opt into your email list in order to get back to their shopping cart.  You're only creating more abandoned shopping carts and if you've ever done anything with eCommerce, you know that's annoying.


Too Much Design On Your Pages
If you're trying too much on your website, just stop.  No one likes a show off and you're just making your website look trashy.  One of the first things you learn in art class is that you can over do it with just a single brush stroke, which is true in web design as well.  There is a line that is very easy to cross when it comes to a good design and a design that looks like you tried everything at the same time lol.  Make it basic but modern and clean at the same time and you've got a winning design combo on your hands 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business


No Optimization
I can't get over this.  I get clients coming to me every week complaining about their websites not increasing in the rankings as much as I had told them they could be.  I then tell them that they requested that I not access their code and optimize their pages for the search engines in order to have proper on page optimization.  They then back peddle and try to tell me that I could have accessed the website whenever I wanted... But they never gave me the login details lmao 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business  You need to optimize your website off page and on page in order to increase in the SERPs and get more traffic from the search engines.  You can't just do one and expect to rank high, you need both. 




In Conclusion:
These are just 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business in a short amount of time.  Most of the reasons are easily fixable if you just sit down for a day and take your time editing.  Hell, you could even hire someone to fix all of this for a few bucks.  At the end of the day you need to think of how people are going to act on your website.  If they get annoyed or lost at any point while they are on your website, you're likely going to lose a sale.



Remember to follow me 10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business
https://www.seocheckout.com/user/Razzy


Thanks!

Razzy

Comments

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Cristian
I believe for eCommerce website, A/B tests are essential! You need to constantly improve your user experience and the only way of doing that is to test and test again!
How do you know you've made the right change? Your conversion rate goes up!
All of the reasons Razzy enumerated above are valid and highly important for any web store! Once you have all that in check you need to think about how the users are interacting with your website and find exactly what you can improve.

For example, the simple color and location of the "Order" button matters A LOT! It is highly important to find the best alternative with the best conversion rate. This can be even more challenging if you have low traffic and no credible facts can be drawn from the data available to you in a period of a few days.



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Makefort
This was definitely a nice list. I would like to put an extra emphasis on Not Enough Payment Options. Why? Well, if you are running a global business, your main goal should be to offer as many as possible, because certain countries might not have access to some options. Forcing people to register might not be a bad thing, depending on the type of eCommerce you might be running. Although, it surely is annoying if it's unneeded.



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vinaya
I started my ecommerce business couple of months ago. Sadly,I have not sold any products yet.Probably I am making some of the mistakes stated above. My ecommerce store is an affiliating marketing business. I don't sell products myself rather drive customers to other stores. I am using Amazon,Linkshare, Commission Junction.
Since I send customers to affiliate networks, I don't have to deal with some of the points mentioned above,however,I believe some tweaks will help my website.



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hermessantos
Post very interesting!

I think we should always think with the minds of our customers to better analyze what we should improve in our online business.
Sometimes the simple sight of a consumer can make a lot of difference to avoid mistakes that can kill our business.



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Moazebrahim
Awesome post, Thank you for posting, Also I agree with you that, We should not only enable PayPal for withdrawing, Because there are many countries that doesn't support PayPal which seems unfair to these countries.



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wallet
Yes, Razzy there are even more than ten mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business, you enumerated the most important ones, especially the payment options, it is true not all will use Paypal and you need to add more payment processors to your eCommerce business. One important mistake that can kill your eCommerce business is to have content which is identical to your competitors, and the best choice to be avoid getting caught is not to index your content, thereby making it invisible from a search perspective.



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vinaya
One of the mistakes related to ecommerce business that I have noticed is related to the slow loading of the site. If the site loads slow, customers may not wait to check the products and place an order. However, there is a solution. You can improve site speed by optimizing images.



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Pixie06
Limited payment options will actually drive customers away. That's the reasons I provide different types of payment methods to my customer. One must also try to spend much time to describe the product. This is important as the description will tempt the customer to buy the product. I think to succeed in your business you must try to understand your customer and satisfy their needs. Providing an exceptional customer service is equally important.



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overcast
I have noticed that most of the e-commerce websites are offering more and more options for the payout. And that can be something good if you ask me about the conversion of the currency. It can be good on the e commerce sites like shopify to follow the local currency. I have seen paypal and the credit card are pretty much dominant. And then spending more time on setting up on getting traffic on landing page can fix some mistakes.



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vinaya
From a customer point view, one of the grave issues regarding buying things online is associated with the payment option. Paypal is the most used payment option, however, paypal is not the only payment option. In fact paypal is not available in many countries including my home country Nepal. If I want to buy online, I need payza, skrill or bitcoin. However, these payment options are not available on many ecommerce sites.



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overcast
This is true paypal is not the only payment option. And accepting local money is the way to go. Not sure if there are local options which works internationally too. It seems to be a good option either way though. I too think bitcoin needs to be more on more payment processing websites. That's something to check out for sure.



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azsdpa12
Great post, Thank for these information, I agree with you PayPal for withdrawing, because paypal are not allowed many countries



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Corzhens
I think that is a silly mistake of not showing your contact info. If the website has that mistake, I guess people will not trust you. This is similar to Facebook users who are into the business of selling. When they are not using their real name for their profile, how can you trust them? I don’t think they can only get clients from people that they know. For strangers, they wouldn’t be trusted.



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