The number of e-commerce stores on the internet is constantly growing. By the end of 2022, the e-commerce market was expected to reach $5.4 trillion in sales, making e-commerce one of the most profitable markets to enter. More and more people are switching to shopping online instead of visiting physical stores and malls. However, building an e-commerce brand that manages to sell successfully is not a simple task at all, and one of the crucial aspects of a store’s success is addressing problems and avoiding potential mistakes in advance.
Most people think an e-commerce store will generate revenue as soon as they start marketing it. Setting up an e-commerce store is one of the popular ways to generate income online, but building the brand and the store is a challenging task. There are many options for building the store – Shopify, WordPress, Wix, and more. When building a store, there is a learning curve for managing the store, customers, and products, so it is impossible to avoid making mistakes; however, it is important to minimize the number of mistakes and, of course, not repeat them over and over. Here are several mistakes that are important to avoid in e-commerce:
1. Ignoring the importance of quality web hosting
Web hosting is an essential part of any website. When launching a website, you need to host it on a server, so the choice of platform is significant since Shopify comes with its own web hosting, unlike WordPress where you will need to choose a hosting company for the store. Website owners often fail to understand the differences between various hosting companies, so it is important to choose a quality web hosting service in advance. It is recommended to choose cloud web hosting, which provides better security for the store and fast page and product page loading speeds.
2. Not offering live support
Live chat on a website is one of the best tools used by e-commerce stores and websites in general, because it converts at a high rate. Adding a live chat on the site helps visitors receive a very fast response, and a quick reply to a potential lead or customer almost guarantees you a conversion. A WhatsApp button can be added instead of a chat button, as long as someone is connected to the WhatsApp account to respond. Not providing visitors with quick answers to questions on the site is a critical mistake that many stores make without realizing how many leads and purchases are missed every day.
3. Crowded and cluttered store appearance
We often see immense clutter on the homepages of e-commerce stores. Website owners want many elements on their page while simultaneously leaving no spacing and separation, making the browsing experience hard on the eyes of visitors. Users will get confused by the sheer number of elements on the site and will not focus on what really matters—buying products. The right choice of template and proper layout of elements on the site will help you make relevant information accessible to visitors, making your site faster and much more visually pleasing.
4. Suboptimal product pages
Your product page is your only opportunity to convince customers to purchase the product. You need to create an easy-to-understand product page with all relevant details, images, videos, and any information that will help the customer better understand what they are buying and how the product is going to help them after the purchase. On product pages for digital products, make sure to invest even more since there is no tangible product to display to visitors. When building a product page on an e-commerce site, it is important to ensure the following: convenient search filters so visitors can easily find what they are looking for, and a product image gallery showing all angles.
5. Limited payment options
The ultimate goal in an e-commerce store is to generate a conversion action where the visitor pays online and purchases a product. When building an e-commerce store, payment processing must be at the top of your priorities. Most store owners do not make the effort to integrate multiple payment solutions and consequently lose customers. In order to have a functional online store, you must provide visitors with multiple payment methods to significantly improve the conversion rate and avoid losing customers. Alongside familiar payment options like credit cards and PayPal, also integrate advanced options such as Bit, Paybox, Bitcoin, and more.
6. Inefficient checkout page
Many store owners lose customers at the checkout because they did not optimize the purchasing process in the store and did not optimize the cart and checkout pages. Right now, you can check your cart or checkout abandonment rates and understand if you have a problem in the purchasing process. E-commerce stores lose hundreds of purchases a month when visitors consistently abandon at the end of the process, which is why it is important to improve the checkout page: add a discount code field on the page, design the page in an inviting and user-friendly manner, and combine the checkout and cart pages so the visitor has one less page in their customer journey.
7. Lack of investment in SEO
Another common mistake on e-commerce sites is the lack of attention to organic SEO. Although organic SEO for a store containing thousands of products can be a complex task, because not many stores place an emphasis on SEO, if you focus on it, you will gain fast rankings and many customers without spending an advertising budget. Invest in extensive product descriptions and well-maintained product pages, and they will rank for key search terms. In stores with a large number of products, it is recommended to focus on category optimization (car gadgets, baby products, garden products, etc.) and the homepage.
8. Not monitoring visitors and drawing conclusions
Monitoring visitors in an e-commerce store is critical for continuously improving performance and conversion rates. Without appropriate analytical tools that measure all relevant parameters, you lose the valuable insights that can be generated from the traffic coming to the store. With analytical tools, you can accurately tell how many conversions came from each marketing channel you used, allowing you to improve marketing channels and optimize campaigns. Using the tool Google Analytics, you can measure every action taken on your site, with an emphasis on conversion actions that are critical for an e-commerce store, and with Hotjar, you can view screen recordings of visitors, the actions they took, how far they scrolled down the page, and more. These tools provide you with insights into visitor behavior on the site, so if you identify a specific problem area, you can immediately fix and adjust it.
Conclusion
There are many mistakes in managing an online store that you probably won’t be able to avoid. In general, managing a store includes orders, customers, suppliers, customer service, returns, etc. It is a long journey, and you fix mistakes along the way. We covered 8 key mistakes that are most common in the e-commerce field—mistakes that almost anyone who launches an online store tends to make. Ensuring high-quality web hosting, live support for visitors, a clean look for the store, well-crafted product pages, multiple payment options, a high-converting checkout page, organic SEO for the store, and drawing conclusions with analytics tools will make your work in e-commerce much more professional.
About the author
Dvir Naaman, 26 years old, an entrepreneur at heart, loves e-commerce websites, and specializes in SEO.
