Running an online website to sell your products can be a great money-making business. Compared to brick-and-mortar stores, an eCommerce website has a very low overhead, which helps you improve the bottom line.
Simply starting a website won’t guarantee success. So many things that can go wrong require attention from user experience to design everything should be smooth and sleek.
eCommerce store owners often face dilemmas with sales going down, and the worst part is they don’t know what to do about it. They constantly try to figure out where things went wrong. You have fantastic products a marketing campaign & still, sales are not picking up. People are coming to your website and spending time on the pages, but it just doesn’t translate into sales.
There are tons of mistakes that eCommerce owners make every day. Most of them are avoidable with careful planning. But, unfortunately, few of them are very easy to fix. One thing to note here is sales process can often be more complex than it seems. From the convincing landing page to the “Submit Order” button at the checkout page, every step is critical of the sales page. Nevertheless, there are common eCommerce mistakes that you can avoid to boost sales.
When analyzing the sales process, start with these three common eCommerce mistakes:
Shipping
According to BI, intelligence estimates approximately $4 trillion worth of merchandise abandoned by shoppers in online shopping carts. The number one reason is the unexpected shipping cost. Some shoppers won’t purchase a product if they believe the shipping cost is too much. Many shoppers compare the prices with different websites before buying a product. Shipping cost is an essential factor when purchasing a product. The most obvious fix is to offer free shipping. Approx 85% of shoppers claim free shipping is the number one incentive to buy an item online.
Long/Confusing Checkout Process
Shoppers generally want to buy and be finished. Having too many steps in your checkout could lose website visitors’ attention. You have to make it easy for your customers to hand over card information to complete orders. The more steps you put between adding an item to the cart and paying for that item more you allow them to leave the website without purchasing that item.
The ideal checkout process should include a single page to check their final order(s) and enter their billing & shipping information. Then, display the confirmation page before they hit submit button. Anything more than that is only a barrier to completing the checkout process.
Not Analyzing the Data Regularly
You should monitor and analyze your visitor data regularly. Just think of a bakery shop owner who, daily, will check figures such as revenue, which project does get sold, total visitors, etc., to gain critical insight to determine how the overall business is progressing.
Similarly, being an owner of an eCommerce store, you need to analyze the detailed analytics of the website. You need to analyze the visitor’s behavior, sources of traffic, bounce rate, on-page time, heatmap, etc. Google Analytics gives you all the information with a click of a mouse. Be sure you track your website and see the area you lack to improve it. For example, you are getting a good conversion from Facebook Ads instead of Instagram ads, you can increase a Facebook Ad budget and increase more qualified traffic.
Closing eCommerce sales are never easy. However, the entire sales process should be a pleasant journey from the visual element to the checkout process. Test drive your website as if you were a customer and see what you would like to improve. If you focus on correcting small incremental changes in the entire customer journey, you will surely see increased customer engagement and sales.
Author Bio:
Gaurav Kanabar is the Director of Alphanso Tech, a globally acknowledged IT consulting company providing WordPress Development Services & iPhone App Development services. With the immense support from the adroit team, Alphanso Tech has been serving a vast client base worldwide.
