As you might already know, you are facing a tough competition if you are having an online store – unless you are serving a niche market. Can you really afford to make mistakes while setting up an ecommerce store? Of course not. But to avoid making mistakes that can cost you sales and profits, you need to know about them. So let’s discuss those mistakes.
1. Non-relevant landing pages:
Your main goal to bring visitors from search engines and social networking platforms to your landing page. But what will happen once you bring that traffic to the landing page if it’s full of irrelevant content? Visitors will leave right away, increasing your bounce rate. So never ever have irrelevant content on the landing page; in fact, don’t have irrelevant content on any page. Period.
2. Poor search functionality:
A large part of your organic traffic will always be from search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! – reflecting the fact that your visitors have a preference for effective, sophisticated search features. So don’t disappoint your visitors by offering them low-quality search functionalities. Equip your search functionality to:
- Handle typos
- Understand plurals
- Offer thesaurus
- Consider relevance of keywords
- Offer suggestions
3. Low-quality content:
Content includes text content, images, videos and any other media material. Next to navigation and design, content is the next thing that a visitor considers. Imagine having a content that’s full of errors and of low readability. Wouldn’t that irritate the readers, compelling them to abandon the site? Always make sure that the content, including product descriptions, on your website or online store is impeccable. Also, when the content is rich, visitors will love to visit you repeatedly, and do you really need us to spell out what would that mean for your business?
4. Lack of shipping details:
Offering shipping details to your potential customers is common sense. Unless your visitors know how they will receive their orders, they would be wary of buying anything. So tell them which shipping methods you use. Also, disclose all kinds of shipping charge. It definitely doesn’t sit well with the buyers when they encounter hidden charges on the last page of the checkout; and if you do add hidden charges, you will not only lose your present sale but also all your future sales. You are better off changing this practice.
Do you know what other mistakes that an eCommerce merchant should avoid for better sales? Share it with us now!
Thanks for your post,
We find the details you need to focus on when creating an e-Commerce website are different than those of a standard business website. I particularly liked your point about Non-relevant landing pages and Lack of shipping details, its goes back to the basics of creating a good, easy, satisfactory user experience by giving them an easy to navigate website.
Well written article. These are basic mistakes that no website should ever commit.
As for e-commerce search engines, there are only a few different offerings. Most e-commerce sites use different interfaces accessing the same search engine API. Those search engines will handle typos, understand plurals, offer thesaurus, consider the relevance of keywords and offer suggestions. However to my knowledge majority of e-commerce search engines do not support common queries that include symptoms, relations, theme or subjective inputs. This lack of support lowers conversion rate and top line sales. One company is working on a solution to improve product discovery on e-commerce sites. Inferlytics.com
Indeed a very helpful article. Websites today need to take care of these aspects in detail if they want to retain their customer base. Also, totally optimized websites is the need of the hour as they improve your conversion rates and boost your rankings.