10 mistakes that can kill your eCommerce business

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


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


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


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


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   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.



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Thanks!

Razzy