5 Mistakes Your Ecommerce Store Must Avoid

Are you new to the world of e-commerce?

Or just trying to kickstart your own online business by using your own brand?

If you are brand new to the world of e-commerce and would like to start your own e-commerce site, we have a word of advice for you:  Focus on getting your marketing act right.

Why Implementing the Correct Marketing Activity is Crucial?

That’s because committing careless mistakes in marketing activity in the long run for your business will cost you dearly and make your website suffer whereas proper planning and execution of white hat SEO and well-optimised website will boost your website ranking in the search engines which helps to improve your conversions and customer experience, especially if you have good products to offer.

Based on the recent international survey, more than half of the E-commerce startups fail due to the existence of established brands such as Amazon, Alibaba, Etsy, Newegg, Rakuten etc. Hence, it’s important to avoid committing the following mistakes if you want to compete with these “big boys”.

Mistake #1:  Place Little Priority on Mobile Visitors/ Mobile Traffic

Do you know that mobile traffic is the next “in” thing in the space of online marketing?  For the past 12 months (since early 2017), the average smartphone conversion rates of the e-commerce website are up by 64% compared to the desktop.  Nowadays, it is crucial to design a responsive website or an App because potential buyers or visitors are now accessing the Internet on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets when they wish to buy products online.  If you ignore this important fact, then you are basically losing nearly 50% conversion of your website!

In fact, Google have recognized the importance of mobile traffic by releasing their own proprietary Mobile First-Index Test tool back in March 2016. What this tool does is that it compares your mobile and desktop pages and reports on discrepencies between SEO signals (canonical, rel=”prev/next”, hreflang tags, etc.), content (page title, links, alt=”text”, etc.) and structured data markups. It also checks if your page is mobile-friendly via Google’s API.

With this tool, instead of indexing desktop versions of a given site to evaluate and rank pages based on relevance, Google will now place importance on your mobile site first.

Here’s how “Mobile-First Indexing” works in a nutshell compare to the previous “Desktop-First Indexing” ranking approach.

Is your site ready for Google’s mobile-first indexing? If not, you’re risking both sales and traffic since it has been projected that 79 percent of global internet traffic will be mobile by the end of 2018.

So get your website becoming mobile friendly now is your first priority!

Mistake #2: Ignoring Technical SEO Issues

You can’t deny that technical SEO issues can affect the website performance and website ranking in the search engines. These also include general websites and e-commerce website store. Please take note of the following important technical SEO issues that must be reviewed:

• Implementing poorly planned site navigation
• Duplicate Product Pages and Contents
• Poor structure of the website URLs
• Proper use of 301s, 302s and canonical tag
• Dead links or 404 Pages
• Use of iFrames and Flash
• Website download speed
• Webpage Indexing or not and robots.txt issue

Customer experience and conversion optimization issues:

• Schema Markup, Reviews, and Ratings
• Low-quality product images
• Products without Descriptions
• No Shipping and Delivery information
• Missing Call to Action Words

What you need to know is that 50% progress of the website depends on effective technical SEO improvements. Therefore you need to make it a priority to get your technical issues fixed with a professional.

Mistake #3: Wrong Choice of Platform and Hosting for Your Website

Often many think that they can simply pick and choose any e-commerce platform or hosting provider to host their e-commerce website. However, the fact is that your website is the foundation of your business and reflection of your brand. Let’s imagine for a second, if you pick the wrong e-commerce platform then you are putting yourself in a disaster. If this happens, how will this affect your reputation and future sales volume of your online store?

Besides choosing the best e-commerce platform for your business, you also need to review the following:

• Identify any hardware and software limitations
• Which “Payment Methods” are suitable for mobile commerce
• Do you have zero or 100% control over your online store?
• How much help with marketing
• Is there Drop-shipping options
• Third-party integration Options

There’s many e-commerce platforms out there for you to choose e.g. Big Commerce, Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify and many more. In this case, you need to review all features first and think carefully which platform is the most suitable for your needs before you even begin to design your e-commerce website.

Apart from e-commerce platform, picking web hosting services is also considered vital when trying to run an e-commerce online store. Do take note that a web hosting can make or break your site performance because any long downtime will certainly affect your web accessibility and thus negatively impact your sales conversions.  Always choose the web host provider that can offer at least 99.5% minimum uptime guarantee. Other important features that you cannot simply ignore are e-commerce security and reliability. You must select the best web hosting provider based on their offer and functions such as SSL Certificates implementation to secure website, malware & virus protection, website backup availability or services and how fast or good is their customer service response.

Mistake #4: Making Checkout Process Complicated

Always think from customer’s point of view.

Do they want hassle-free and fast checkout process?

How about quick customer login that auto loads their credit card information during checkout?

If the answer is a “Yes”, then do not apply complicated checkout process since what we want for our clients is to have positive shopping experience and obtain high conversions for our online store – which is our primary objective.

For instance, you can simplify the checkout process by requesting your customers to sign up with an email address or mobile number and followed by delivery address of the customer. Do not complicate things further by adding an extra field to fill. As mentioned earlier, making your shopping cart mobile-user friendly is an absolute must so that your mobile customer can proceed with checkout seamlessly.

Mistake #5: No “Contact Us” Page or Poor Customer Service

Always include a “Contact Us” page on your e-commerce website no matter how simple your website can be. This is a must because customers will avoid purchasing products on unknown websites or brands. If you want to gain your clients’ trust, your Contact Us and About Us pages must be added to your website’s menu section. You can also consider adding your contact and other business information at the footer of your website.

Lastly, poor customer service can destroy your brand and business reputation. In this modern era of technology, your customers want to get their issues resolved as fast as possible. This can be in the form of a courtesy call or email without facing any difficulties. You can improve your customer service efficiencies by adding telephonic and social media support teams, and also by launching customer support centers and implementing AI technologies such as chat bots system and live online chat.

There you have it!

The top 5 critical mistakes your e-commerce store must avoid if you wish to have a long lasting and successful online business.