5 Severe Mistakes to Sabotage the Growth of Your Ecommerce Store


When it comes to Ecommerce there are certain elements essential to the success of your Ecommerce store; neglecting these items could be 5 severe mistakes that ultimately sabotage your store right out of the gate.




ecommerce mistakes

Online selling has widened up the scope of marketing for the businesses. The stores can be accessed 24*7 and reaching the global market doesn’t include any overhead expenses like mailings, call centres etc, hence proving to be a boon for every business.

For reaping the benefits of this boon, you need a well-structured website. Just keep all the considerable factors in mind so to avoid any glitches in the time to come. Remember it is not going to be simple like using some shopping cart software and piling up the database with the products.

Let’s have a look at some of the common mistakes that online retailers make every day, pushing their business productivity downwards. This will help you stay prepared against all the odds that make your website rank low among the intended audience. So, make sure you are not making the following mistakes:

1) Not Providing Detailed Information About the Product

Shopping in a brick-and-mortar shop brings along a lot of advantages like picking up the item, look thoroughly through it and reading all the packaging details. On the contrary, shopping online simply cuts out all such interaction. This pressurises the E-commerce sites to come up with the best they can to improve the shopping experience in the virtual space.

Quite often is the case when the online store lacks even the most critical information that customers like to know about a product. And if a customer won’t find the sufficient information on your site, they are likely to move on to some other resource where they can get full specifications. More likely are the chances they will shop the product from there even it costs them more than you have offered.

So, you should provide complete product information. Try to make use of descriptive words rather than being technical as that could have a great impact on your customers.

2) Alienating the Contact Details

Customers are very curious to know whether they’re interacting with a real company, especially when it comes to handing over the most critical details like their credit card information. They want to confirm that a person is sitting there to handle all the queries or problems they have. If you will hide the contact information, customers will find it difficult to trust your website and might not like to involve in any business with you.

In addition to a great looking contact us page, always remember to put the contact information at an easily recognisable spot on every page. You can use the common places like header, footer or the top of the sidebar. Offer different means to contact (if possible). Remember the more expensive or technical will be the item you sell, more will be the customer’s urge to discuss the details with a technical person.

3) A Lengthy or Perplexing Process of Checkout

It happens to be one of the most influential mistakes that an Ecommerce website can make. You must make the checkout process as easy as possible for your customers so that they can quickly complete their order with you. The more will be the distance between the cart and payment gateway, the more chances you are giving them to abandon you site without the completion of your purchase.

The ideal checkout process comprises a page where the customers can check their order and enter the billing and shipping details, and a confirmation message before they finally make an order. Anything more than this will serve as an obstacle to complete the purchase.

So make sure you follow the ideal process to keep the things simple and quick for your customers.

4) Asking for an Account Registration to make an Order

This is closely related to the previous concern. If you will ask a customer to sign up or create an account before placing their order, it’s just another obstacle you will be placing their way. Think – what’s important – getting an order or unnecessary details of the customer. Always remember that the more information implies losing more customers.

If you want them to sign up, try the alternative way by giving them the option to connect after the order completion. You can ask them some details for providing continuous tracking details. The customers won’t find any problem sharing the details then. And you won’t be pushing them away before the completion of order.

5) Inadequate Search Engine on Site is not Acceptable

If customers know what they want, they will simply choose using the search tab instead of crawling through the entire categories and filters provided on the website. It is quite important to check that the search feature is working well and comprises of filters so to help customers refine the results.

Remember to not to make the sorting task complicated for your customers. Let them experience ease and convenience to the best.

This is just the beginning. There are lot other mistakes that online retailers generally make and spoil the customer experience. Wait for another post with some more things that need to be considered for enhanced customer experience and engagement on your Ecommerce website.