10 Ways To Ruin Your eCommerce Store
Good people make bad decisions every day without even knowing it… don’t let this be you when running your ecommerce store. Here are 10 ways to ruin your ecommerce site…so that you can avoid ruining yours.
1. Slow Speed
Whether you have developed your ecommerce store from the ground up or have started with a theme, make sure to pay attention to the speed of your site. This is absolutely critical.
If you’re not keeping an eye on this, all of those fancy options and animations that you think will improve your site experience will actually do just the opposite. All of these fancy features can bloat your site, making it incredibly slow.
This leaves visitor frustrated, and likely to jump ship. Not to mention, google doesn’t like it either when it comes to search engine rankings.
2. Too Complex
Don’t make your customers make too many decisions. You should present 3 options at a time at most. Otherwise they will experience paralysis by analysis and go somewhere that the options are simple and clear.
If you have a complex product line, make sure that you categorize it well and provide high quality filtering on your listing pages so that visitors can navigate quickly to the products that they are looking for. Guide your visitors through the buying process and make sure to organize your products and your site the way that the user thinks about it, not the way that you as a company think about.
A confused customer will not buy.
3. Bad Photography
Bad photography on your site (or even mediocre photography) will kill your conversion rate. You must have stellar photography on your site in order to remain competitive.
This is applies both to product photography as well as lifestyle photography. It’s not enough to have beautiful product photos. You must humanize your products and your brand in order to help your potential customers make a connection with you. This is often the difference between life and death when it comes to an ecommerce site.
4. Impractical Descriptions
We will be the first to admit that getting product descriptions right is incredibly difficult. They can’t be too long, nor too short. They need to include all necessary information that a potential customer needs to know, but not more, and be well written and interesting.
This is a tall order. Invest time (and money if necessary to hire a professional writer) to get your product descriptions right.
5. Lacking Trust Elements
If potential customers are interacting with your brand for the first time, you need to build trust with them. This can be done in many ways, such as product reviews, testimonials, product warranties or guarantees, a stellar return policy, as well as displaying security badges so that they know their data is safe when shopping with you.
The more of these trust building elements that you can include on your site, the better.
6. No Cart Abandonment Follow Up
If you are not following up with customers that abandon their cart full of products, or worse, checkout mid process, you are missing out on low hanging fruit.
These customers went all of the way through the process of selecting products and beginning the checkout process…so obviously they were quite interested in purchasing from you.
Who knows why they abandoned the checkout at the last minute. Perhaps they really changed their mind about making the purchase. But perhaps they just got distracted by something else and meant to return later. Likely they just need a couple more nudges to get them over the edge and make the purchase.
Follow up with customers who abandon cart three times, offering a small discount to complete their purchase on the 2nd or 3rd follow up. This will close more sales than you think.
7. No Targeted Landing Pages
You likely put lots of time and effort into your marketing efforts (as you should), crafting the perfect messaging and creative to resonate with your different target segments. So don’t just throw them onto your homepage or a category page once they click through your ads (whether they be social, PPC, display, or otherwise). This is a conversion killer.
Instead, land them on a specific landing page that maintains the context of the ad that inspired them to click through. You must maintain the scent to keep your customers moving through the conversion funnel.
8. Lack of Visibility
No, we don’t mean visibility of your brand to your customers. What we mean is visibility into your own site and performance so that you can determine what is working and what’s not in order to continue improving day after day, week after week.
You need an in-depth analytics install to be able to analyze the success of each channel and campaign. Otherwise, you are flying blind.
9. Poor Mobile Experience
Or worse, no mobile experience. If your ecommerce site is not mobile friendly, you are losing out on a huge percentage of sales. Mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic for most sites, so if your mobile experience is sub par, that means your primary point of contact with potential customers is sub par.
If you don’t have a stellar mobile experience today, make this your main priority, starting now.
10. Limited Brand Content
This one may surprise you, but communicating who your brand is, where you came from, and what you stand for is incredibly important in this day and age. A cold site that is purely focused on sales will fail to win over many customers. More and more people care about the story behind the brands that they purchase from today, so make sure that have a good story and that you are communicating it well on your site.
