The Most Common E-commerce Mistakes to Avoid
Running an e-commerce business comes with many hurdles and obstacles, so it’s totally acceptable to make some mistakes along the way. Some mistakes, however, are so common that it begs the question as to why it keeps happening.
Is it laziness, lack of awareness, or sheer carelessness? Only time will tell…
Luckily, whatever mistake is in question, there IS a solution, and oftentimes many solutions in order to avoid such a mistake from happening again. With that said, if you’re a functioning e-commerce business eager to streamline your processes and assess your mistakes to ensure that they don’t continue to exacerbate themselves, continue reading because this article is for you!
In what follows, we outline some of the most common e-commerce mistakes made and solutions as to how to avoid making them. Let’s get right into it…
5 of the Most Common E-commerce Mistakes
While there are many common mistakes that today’s online businesses continue to make on a daily basis, there are some that are more common than others, hence their importance to outline and discuss.
Below are five of the most common e-commerce mistakes and how to avoid them:
- Poorly Designed Website
- Failing to Define or Understand Your Audience
- Lacking A+ Customer Service
- Not Capitalizing on Social Media
- Zero Consideration of SEO
Poorly Designed Website
In today’s digital era where everything lives and takes place online, it’s imperative that you treat your website design like it’s your storefront because, well, it is… Like anything, the appeal of your website makes all the difference when it comes to a customer deciding to stay and shop around or leave immediately upon arrival.
In short, your website design is arguably the best investment that you can make as an e-commerce business. Not only is it what curates a successful first impression but it ultimately results in an increase in conversions if designed with aesthetics and functionality in mind.
Failing to Define or Understand Your Audience
Embarrassing but true, failing to define or understand one’s target audience is one of, if not the most common mistake new e-commerce businesses make during the first days, weeks, and months of operation. Why and how it’s such a common e-commerce mistake is beyond us…
The good news is that the solution to avoiding this mistake is simple; just define your target audience before placing the open sign on your front door (figuratively, of course)!
The more specific you can become with defining your audience and the better you understand their interests, desires, and behaviours, the more successful you as an e-commerce business are going to be in the long run…
Lacking A+ Customer Service
While it’s not a glamorous department of a business, great customer service is the backbone of any successful company. Unfortunately, many continue to fail to invest both their time, money, and effort into prioritizing impeccable customer service.
The likely candidate as to why? Simply put, humans are expensive to hire… Luckily, one such solution is the implementation of marketing automation and chatbots!
While you’ll still need to have a level of human autonomy over your customer service department to ensure things run smoothly and to be there should things go array (FYI, they will), using technology to your advantage is an incredible way to immediately improve your customer service.
Not Capitalizing on Social Media
As mentioned earlier, in today’s digital age, everything lives and takes place online; all communication and interaction, all decisions, information sharing, purchasing, and more.
Undeniably the number one online arena for all of these actions? Social media, of course…
With billions of people on social media at any given point throughout the day globally, many of them willing and eager to consume content and purchase products, it’s mind-blogging to believe that there are businesses out there who still fail to see the value and opportunity that is social media. but… there is.
If you’re an online e-commerce business and you’re not yet on social media, set up a profile today! Failure to do so will likely result in irrelevance, a loss of authority, and soon enough, the death of your business.
Zero Consideration of SEO
Last but not least, withstanding its sheer value and importance to today’s e-commerce businesses, failing to consider SEO still persists as a leading e-commerce mistake. Unlike the aforementioned mistakes, however, this one is somewhat understandable (though still not acceptable).
While some standard practices that are simple and easy to implement (like blogging, for example) can help improve a website’s SEO, several other more technical considerations are required in order to make any worthwhile progress in the arena of SEO.
This, of course, comes with a steep learning curve and niche skillset; two characteristics many businesses fail to behold or seek out… If this scenario sounds like your business, it’s recommended to take the time to hire the necessary candidates that boast the skills required to build out and execute a comprehensive SEO strategy.
This will save you both time, money, and a ton of headaches, while also helping grow your business in the process.
