What are the top e-commerce mistakes you’re guilty of? Not sure?
If like many, you have recently made the transition from a physical store to an e-commerce site, then you will soon find that it’s an entirely different beast to hop on top of. There are always barriers between customers and their purchases, and you may be used to dealing with some, but taking it online can add entirely new barriers. Here, we’re going to look at some of the most common and what you can do about them.
Not optimizing your site for speed
Most people shopping on the internet are, to some degree, impatient. Given how smooth the online world is, most of the time, a lot of us don’t have the patient to wait for a page that will take longer than ten seconds to load. In fact, nearly half of all users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. There are ways to help your website load faster, such as choosing optimized images and videos that take much less power to load and keeping your site architecture relatively simple.
Not investing in improving hosting
When first starting off, it’s only natural that you invest in the most affordable hosting, which is usually shared hosting. This means your website is on the same server as dozens if not hundreds of other websites. This limits your website, however, in how it’s able to handle the traffic, for instance. There are cheap Windows VPS options that allow you to make your website a lot more scalable to demand. As such, your customers aren’t as likely to experience slow-down and broken pages as they would be, otherwise.
Not making the checkout process clear
Every e-commerce website has a checkout process, but that process can differ from website to website. Some might be able to get you to the shipping page in as few as three clicks. Others will demand a lengthy sign-up process. There are steps you can take to shorten the checkout process, such as allowing people to checkout as guests. However, no matter how many steps there are, it’s wise to use breadcrumb navigation so that your website users can see what step of the process they are in. If they know the end is approaching, they’re less likely to get frustrated and to abandon the whole thing.
Giving up on abandoned shopping carts
Just because a customer gave up on a certain sale doesn’t mean that you can’t still convert them. While decreasing shopping cart abandonment should be an aim, you can also follow up to lure them back in. Shopping cart abandonment emails can remind users of products they looked at in the past, similar products that have a more tempting offer, or related items that might be able to tempt them back to your store. Don’t give up on a sale because it didn’t work once.
When you’re running an e-commerce website, you need to worry about not only how you’re marketing and selling products, but also about website design, stability, and outreach long after they’ve left the site.
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