For April Fools’ Day, we listed out 27 common ecommerce mistakes with a promise to delve in deeper throughout the month. To make it easier to digest, we've split the 27 mistakes into two parts. Without further ado, here are the first 14 mistakes with a little more in-depth analysis.
1. Depending on only one channel of traffic
Focusing all of your efforts and depending on only one channel of traffic may give your business a short-term boost, but it can severely limit your growth in the long-term. Think about it – a business that only focuses and relies on Google for their traffic may find themselves hurting if an algorithm change or update throws their website off the grid. A business with a multichannel focus and approach will be able to adapt more easily to help cover and protect against any losses in one area or another.
2. Going stagnant on production
If your product line never changes, you might be getting left behind. Markets are constantly changing and consumers with them. If your competitors are introducing and testing out new products and your business isn’t, you run the risk of getting left in the dust.
You’ll have your best sellers, but don’t be afraid to experiment with new product categories. You might just discover a new best seller. Keeping a fresh line of products ready to add to your store allows you to try out new & improved promotions for improved selling to your existing customer base (and reaching out to new potential customers). That’s one way to increase your revenue stream easily and effectively.
3. Never updating the site’s design
Yes, refreshing content, featuring new products, and creating promotions can be a challenge, but if you never undertake that challenge, your online store will get staler (and possibly moldier) than 7-week-old bread. Ideally, you’re doing something weekly, whether it’s presenting new products or new promotions for products. That can be a bit of a stretch so, instead, do the following on a regular basis:
- Freshen up your site, at least every season
- Change up your homepage, a few categories, & promotions
- Remove old promotions
- Pull items that will be out of stock indefinitely
- Check for and remove broken links
Throw out the stale bread; your customers will thank you for it.
4. Not monitoring performance
Data is necessary to drive informed business decisions. Informed decisions backed by data tend to be the ones responsible for growth and increases in revenue. At a minimum, you should track the following daily:
- Store traffic
- New visitors
- Referral sources
- Cart abandonment
- Checkout abandonment
- Revenue
- New customers
- AOV (average order value)
- Any other KPIs important to your business
If you’re running PPC, check your ad performance weekly; an in-depth review will help ensure the money spent on PPC ads is worth every penny. If you outsource your PPC, it’s better to check up on your supplier’s performance, just to keep a tab on whether any ads, campaigns, and keywords are underperforming.
Without knowledge and data influencing your next steps, you risk your business’ growth plateauing and eventually declining as you waste more and more resources on methods that aren’t working – if you’re not tracking anything, you won’t know they’re not working or how to fix them.
5. Assuming you know what your customers want
Never just assume you know what your customers want. By analyzing data, you can get a good idea. Sometimes you might be right, but, if you never ask, you’ll never know, especially with product selection and the design on your online store. If you’re thinking about changing the design of your site:
- Conduct A/B tests if you have enough traffic
- Get feedback through surveys
- Host an online chat to ask questions
- Informally poll customers
- Talk with customers who call in about what they would like to see
If you don’t ask, you’ll never discover what you might learn.
6. Relying too heavily on promotions to drive revenue
Promotions are great for drawing attention to certain products or categories in short bursts, but that’s what they are, a short-term strategy. Relying only on promotions is not generally a sustainable long-term strategy. There are some business philosophies/models that thrive on short-term sales, limited time coupons, and other promotions, but keep in mind, unless your business model is specifically built for these, by themselves, a promotion-only strategy is not a sustainable long-term strategy.
Your site may do well with promotions, but relying on them as the only strategy could be keeping your business from growing and progressing further. Make promotions part of a strategy that encompasses building and maintaining a loyal customer base that is not reliant on discounts or free shipping. Do things like:
- Sell compelling products
- Offer rich content
- Keep your services superior
- Maintain a solid perceived value
- Have the solid brand to back it up
- Make your store easy-to-navigate and fun
- Create an unforgettable user experience
Promotions are fantastic tools, really, they are. Include them in a more robust strategy and build a better business for you and for your customers.
7. Ignoring mobile devices
Even if they end up buying from a desktop, customers love to shop on mobile devices – the mobile experience is part of the buying cycle. If you don’t offer a mobile-friendly experience, you could be driving potential customers away from your brand.
By redesigning your site with a responsive design or by changing platforms to ensure your shopping cart is as relevant as possible, you can ensure your customers have a great mobile shopping experience. Besides, mobile is a channel that puts your business in front of your customers whenever they want and wherever they go; ignoring it would be a mistake.
8. Ignoring the competition
Monitoring your competitors regularly is a necessity. Aside from offering valuable insights, you can also keep an eye on their product & pricing strategies. You can gain insights on what products are not selling, gain ideas for new products, and have an idea of what would be an appropriate pricing level. You don’t want your prices to make you too exclusive while your competitors take your customers by marketing aggressively at a lower price.
9. Providing bad customer service
When customers have dozens, if not hundreds of stores just like yours to choose from, sometimes customer service is the best, and only, thing to set you apart. You want customer loyalty? Then provide the best customer service possible before, during, and after the sale
Being responsive to questions & concerns, offering unexpected rewards/benefits, and engaging customers with informative or entertaining site content before they buy are all a good start to providing a great experience.
10. Worrying too much about prices
Unless you work in an industry where fractions on the dollar can win or lose you a sale, don’t obsess over pricing. In general, having the lowest prices around does not guarantee more sales and it definitely does not guarantee return business. Instead of slashing your prices, be a market leader and provide outstanding customer service. Offer value in order to build value.
Granted, this also means you can’t charge an arm, a leg, and a first-born and still expect customer service to be the tipping point in your favor. Be reasonable with your prices and offer a better purchasing experience – that’s what will pay off for you. Customers buy for many reasons, focusing on just one, like price, is a mistake and a pitfall that many ecommerce merchants make.
11. Having miniscule product images
As an ecommerce merchant, your ultimate goal is to sell products online. Consumers, who are giving you valuable information, want to know what they’re buying. Since they can’t pick up your products and examine them online like they can in a brick-and-mortar store, you need to do everything you can to ensure they have as many opportunities to fall in love with your product as possible. The more interested consumers are in your product, the more likely they will purchase it from you. Ecommerce merchants can do this with product images (and descriptions).
12. Only one product image
Because customers can’t pick up your product, touch it, and examine it from multiple angles, as they could in a physical store, you need to make up for that lost experience in your e-store. Unless your product image allows for customers to zoom in, change colors, and change angles, you’ll need more than one. Provide images of:
- Multiple angles
- Each color
- The front & back
- The sides
- Specific features
Give your customers more opportunities to familiarize themselves with your product, they’ll love it and you’ll love the boost to your bottom line.
13. Providing no or poor product descriptions
Shopping online removes the in-store interaction customers can have with a product. They can’t pick it up, feel it, look at it from every angle, or read the label. By including product descriptions (and images), you provide consumers with a variety of ways to experience your product. It’s okay for product descriptions to be short, just make sure they’re descriptive. You can talk about:
- Materials
- Manufacturing processes
- Sizes
- Weights
- Dimensions
Include anything that allows the customer to get a feel for the product and how great it is. When you have a ton of products, it can be tempting to copy and paste descriptions from the manufacturer, but that can be one of the worst things to do. Not only is it considered duplicate content by the search engines, but you’re missing out on an opportunity to really showcase your products and your business.
We get it; there are only so many ways to describe a t-shirt, but this is your chance to get creative. Turn your product descriptions into poetry, use bullet lists, add specifications – do whatever you need to do to ensure that once a customer is looking at your product, they know exactly why it’s so great and why they should buy it.
14. Not including product reviews
User-generated content is a great way to get fresh, updated content on your site with minimal effort. Customer-generated product reviews are even better because they act as a word-of-mouth referral in the digital realm. Awesome product reviews are one of the benefits you can gain from building a loyal, engaged customer base. Plus, they provide:
- Free product promotion
- Increased trust in your business & products
- Valuable feedback & insights on products
Make sure you provide product reviews for as many products as you can; reviews are generally great for user experience and can help you increase revenue while establishing (or reinforcing) brand loyalty.
14 down, 13 more to go! Running a successful ecommerce store isn’t easy; with so many moving parts and strategies, mistakes are bound to happen. Don’t sweat it! Learn from them, learn from others’ mistakes, continue to educate yourself, and don’t forget to come back next week for Part 2!