When we perceive eCommerce as similar to brick & mortar business, we assure its failure. Unfortunately, several mistakes impact the success of an eCommerce store. We have identified some of them below and tips on avoiding failure with your startup.
Having professional consultants and developer teams can increase the likelihood of the success of your eCommerce venture.
Increasing its customer base is a prime target for any business, and the online business model offers that opportunity for all. When you think of eCommerce, you ultimately are breaking the geographical boundaries for your business.
The Internet increases the chances of customer acquisition and makes your reach global. Moreover, it saves you from the investment of physical store establishment and related expenditures like maintenance, human resources, sales, inventory, presentation, and a lot more.
Today, creating an online storefront is easy and handy for tech-savvy people. Open-source eCommerce platforms provide ready-to-use templates or themes to make your online store live with a few tweaks and some hosting skills or knowledge that any power user can possess.
Therefore, new generation startups are tempted to immediately jump on an eCommerce idea with immense dreams in their eyes. But, unfortunately, most eCommerce startups have hardly any prior experience or knowledge of running a business with success.
On the other hand, when an established offline brand thinks of eCommerce, they have practical experience running a business in the real world. Still, they lack experience and expertise running a virtual portal online.
These apparent realities turn glorious dreams of eCommerce into gloomy failures in short to longer-term. However, if we dissect further, some other factors determine the success and failures of your eCommerce adventure so let’s explore them in detail.
Reason #1: Waiter Mentality Rather Than Salesman Approaches
In most brick & mortar businesses, we erect the shop, keep products, display products decently, do some traditional marketing, and wait for consumers to arrive in the store, hoping they will come. Then, we will serve them your goods and services and gain profits.
Like in a restaurant, waiters come into action after the order has been placed. Otherwise, they stay passive and never try to acquire any customer directly. Against these, salespeople roam into nearby areas to make the brand viral, interact with people, and tempt them to visit the store through various marketing incentives and techniques.
As discussed earlier, power users and low-end developers can create an eCommerce store using open source technologies within a fraction of the time. They may upload products or services based on the facilities available in themes. Then they will wait for visitors to arrive just like a waiter and do nothing more than these.
Fixes:
Be active and proactive, as eCommerce sites never sell themselves. Therefore, you need to create compelling content and product images, forecast your policies to build trust, including positive reviews, display shipping, and return policies and declare marketing incentives.
These are vital actions that no eCommerce owner or marketer/developer can ignore at any cost.
Reason #2: Unfit eCommerce Development
Today expectations of online shoppers are high and minimal needs include
Security: Since money transactions are involved, nobody stays in an insecure eCommerce environment.
Navigation: Shoppers are always in a hurry to find whatever they want in no time, so advanced navigation options such as advanced search features (Suggested search, faceted search, etc.) seem great besides traditional navigation menus and techniques.
Performance: Modern shoppers are on the verge of decreasing patience, and three seconds are standards for a page load. Mobile users are not an exception. Similarly, interactions with smart UI elements must increase with few clicks or taps of fingers.
RWD: Responsive Web Design or mobile-friendly eCommerce is a compulsion today, as a massive audience uses mobile Internet for any task, including shopping.
Fixes:
If you can technically attend to such priorities by hiring suitable eCommerce developers or an eCommerce development company, you may win the half battle upfront.
Your experienced, skilled, and talented eCommerce designers and programmers will take care of all required details during the development of your storefront. In addition, they will infuse excellent user experiences, usability, personalization, and optimization to achieve maximum ROI.
Reason #3: Poor Internet Marketing
Once upon a time, SEO was a synonym of Internet marketing. But, unfortunately, today, Internet marketing is a multi-channel approach including social media marketing (SMM/SMO), content marketing, Paid channels (PPC, Social, Mobile Ads, etc.), and many other new gimmicks.
Fixes:
Hire the best Internet marketing team and the eCommerce development team so they can synchronize marketing approaches in designing and programming processes and make your online store completely fit for the modern Internet marketing arsenals.
Start marketing earlier and with an expert as well as an experienced team. Be active on social media and other channels to grab immense opportunities. Make your marketing goal capture maximum traffic with quality shoppers to raise your conversion rate, hence ROI.
Reason #4: Poor eCommerce Operations
Like the physical store, you have to ensure the products’ supply, stock, and shipping through effective inventory management, order management, and shipping management.
If your shoppers pass through the checkout process and, in the end, realize that the purchased product is missing in your inventory, their frustrations may kill your business.
Similarly, when shoppers know the final price of goods at the end of the checkout process, they annoy and abandon the cart for better options. Moreover, when any customer does not like the product and wants to return it upon receiving it, they will look at your return policies.
Fixes:
Integration of software or functionality in your eCommerce assures all operations transparently and efficiently. For instance, the display of product availability inadequate amount, categories, and sizes encourage more shopping.
Order tracking and shipping management software/features like shipping calculators enable shoppers to know the final cost of products/orders upfront and assure supply monitoring in a real-time manner.
Similarly, comprehensive return policies build trust in eCommerce brands and enhance loyal customer-building processes.
Reason #5: Poor Support
Whenever your shoppers need your help, your service staff or you should be available to answer their queries appropriately and in satisfactory ways. Therefore, without substantial support, you may lose the confidence of your shoppers and lose the business too.
Fixes:
Instead of managing support services alone or with inadequate staff, you must allocate enough trained and professional resources to address any scale of support to your valuable shoppers in real-time.
Today we have myriads of instant messengers and VOIP-like communication options to explore. Facebook chats are a stylish and feasible way to enhance two-way communications.
eCommerce demands different treatment and approaches than a brick & mortar store. Therefore, active participation, salespeople like strategies, high-end eCommerce development, comprehensive eCommerce management, and supports are factors that lead to absolute success in an eCommerce venture and save you from failures as it happens on a broad scale today.
Tarang Vyash is the Head of the Development Team at Mag Ecommerce Studio, the Leading Magento Development Company. He has been in the industry for the last 15+ Years.
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