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The world of eCommerce has grown significantly over the past few years.
Each year, the online turf is becoming more competitive and crowded with new businesses that are trying to thrive. Mistakes in such an environment can turn out to be costly and therefore should be avoided at all costs.
The reason why this fact cannot be stressed enough is that today’s consumers have more power than ever before. If they’ve had a bad experience with your eCommerce store for any reason, they’ll simply stop shopping with you and move to a competitor.
Given that it costs 5-25 times more to acquire new customers, your growing eCommerce store cannot afford to lose customers like this. That’s why it’s vital to avoid making mistakes altogether. Which is easier said than done.
Fortunately, there is a way to tread lightly in a market where impressions matter the most.
All you need is a solid strategy that will allow you to move forward. With that in mind, here are a few common eCommerce mistakes that you can avoid in 2021.
Non-mobile-friendly Site
Nowadays, having an eCommerce website that isn’t mobile-friendly is a big no-no!
Consumers all over the world are shopping online using a mobile device, more precisely a smartphone.
That said, mobile commerce is on the rise and according to Statista, it’s estimated that 72.9% of all eCommerce sales in the world will come from mobile commerce.
An eCommerce store that isn’t optimized properly for mobile is going to lose a lot of customers.
You should at least have a responsive mobile-friendly design for your online store.
Optimizing fully for mobile isn’t something that can happen overnight, and that’s okay. No one is going to abandon your store if you’re in the process of making everything mobile-friendly. However, refusing to do so is a completely different story with a bad ending for your eCommerce business.
If you are considering how to optimize your eCommerce store for mobile and boost sales via it, here are some best practices to boost sales by optimizing your eCommerce store for mobile by Magento, a leading eCommerce platform. If you are new to the eCommerce industry, you can consider these strategies from the very beginning.
Misunderstood Audience
Another potentially critical mistake you can make is not making an effort to understand your target audience.
Market research is something all businesses should rely on, not just startups. Having a connection with your audience and encouraging them to buy from you comes from understanding them.
You cannot know what they want, need, expect or demand unless you take the time to find out.
If you don’t know anything about your consumers, you cannot communicate with them properly, let alone expect them to buy from you.
If you want a more meaningful and personal relationship with your audience, here are a few things you should do:
- Create buyer personas
- Determine your audience’s preferences, expectations, don’ts, and needs
- Determine their pain points
- Understand their behavior
- Research their demographics
- Learn which values are important to them
- Learn how to communicate with them
Poor Website Design
Customer experience is the elixir of success an eCommerce store.
Consumers aren’t just focused on which products you have to offer or how many of them there are, but are more focused on the experience you can provide them with.
And when it comes to the overall shopping experience, your website’s design too plays a vital role.
If the quality of your design is poor or has horrible visuals, your visitors will bounce right off even before considering making a purchase. You can get in touch with design experts if you are unaware of how to polish your web store’s design.
Bad UX Design
As mentioned before, your website’s design plays a vital role in customer experience. However, there’s also the matter of UX (User Experience) design that’s also a crucial factor. Having a bad UX design is one of the worst mistakes to make.
Visuals are important, but there’s more to UX than it meets the eye.
Consumers want a seamless browsing experience, and they expect you to deliver. In other words, any inconveniences, obstacles, or interruptions will simply force your customers to abandon your store for good.
In most cases, improving UX design has a lot to do with your websites’ functionality.
That said, here are a few things you should focus on:
- Improve website navigation
- Improve page loading time and overall website speed
- Create a seamless checkout process
- Enhance your eCommerce site’s security
- Optimize website content
- Get rid of missing pages, redirects, and errors
- Ensure that your store is user and mobile-friendly
- Provide consumers with necessary information (company policies, “about us” information shipping fees, etc.)
The more seamless the UX on your store is, the more engaged your visitors will be.
And, if they’re satisfied with everything, they’re more likely to convert.
Inefficient Marketing Techniques
Marketing is crucial for eCommerce stores.
Navigating the online market, especially with many competitors can be quite difficult.
Standing out in such a crowd can be tricky without the help of proper marketing plans and techniques.
Neglecting marketing is one of the biggest mistakes any business can make, not only in eCommerce stores. Moreover, focusing on just one marketing method is equally as bad.
For an eCommerce store to have any chance of success, you need to invest in various marketing strategies and campaigns, such as SEO, social media, email marketing, content marketing, etc. A lot of eCommerce owners struggle when it comes to marketing.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of marketing agencies that can help you out in this endeavor. The important thing is to have an effective marketing strategy in place without having to spend your entire budget on it.
Final Word
The eCommerce industry is a large and dynamic environment. Things can change fast, and they can change often. Making a mistake is quite common in such conditions. However, avoiding mistakes should be your top priority, but if you do manage to make one, you must fix it right away.
Such willingness and effort coming from your end can really impress your customers and influence them in giving a (another) chance to you.
Surely implementing all these strategies will take time and effort but you can definitely start one step at a time in order to move forward and thrive in 2021 and beyond!
This is a guest post by Frank Garnett
