Mistakes New Ecommerce Sites Make All Too Often

More than half of all startups fail, while Amazon accounts for over 40% of all online sales.

If you want to succeed in the competitive ecommerce sector, you must avoid the errors that have caused half of your competitors to fail.

Mistakes are opportunities to learn. That is without a doubt the case. However, I believe we can all agree that it would be preferable to avoid making the error in the first place.

Here are blunders that new ecommerce sites should avoid.

1. Inventive+ Imaginative

A new ecommerce business usually falls into one of two categories:

Putting something completely unrelated together.

Trying to come up with a one-of-a-kind solution for everything.

You should not waste resources building custom solutions to problems unless the modification has a clear and direct influence on your branding and ability to provide a unique selling proposition (USP).

Unless your brand’s selling point is a unique platform, you should almost probably leverage an established ecommerce platform like Shopify or Magento rather than attempting to cobble something together yourself.

I’ll give you a heads up right now: most customers want a familiar buying experience, complete with a familiar design and navigational elements.

This holds true for your shopping carts, shipment fulfilment, and almost every other aspect of your company. Allow someone who specialises to handle it if it isn’t your selling point.

Concentrate your efforts on the fundamental differences between you and other industry brands.

2. Design that is untrustworthy

According to a study conducted by experts at Northumbria University, the design of a website has a greater impact on whether users trust it than any of the content on the site.

Unless you are a highly qualified designer yourself, this is one of those areas where you should not attempt to go it alone.

If design isn’t a differentiator for your brand, choose a tried-and-true ecommerce platform with a current, modern theme. Invest in excellent personnel and don’t cut shortcuts if design is important to your brand.

3. Product Descriptions That Are Duplicate

The most typical issue I encounter with a new ecommerce site from an SEO standpoint is redundancy in product descriptions.

You can expect very little search engine traffic on your product pages if your descriptions are nothing more than reprints provided by the product maker.

These product pages will be flagged by Google as duplicates of other pages, and your results will not appear on the first page.

It’s also usual for product descriptions to make no attempt to address buyer objections, comprehend the buyer’s path, or make comparisons that will persuade them to buy the product from your site rather than from someone else’s.

The most crucial material on a website is the product description, which should never be overlooked. If you have a large inventory list, use the Pareto principle and concentrate on your best-selling or most promising products.

4. Lack of Profitability (No, Really)

I realise this seems ridiculous, but it’s all too frequent for a new ecommerce site to be built on a business plan that can’t possibly be lucrative.

You must consider how things will scale, and you must be willing to perform the arithmetic and extrapolate. If your company isn’t profitable right now and your costs don’t scale with output, you’ll lose money if sales increase.

Profitability is a far more crucial goal than expansion at the start, and you must put it ahead of scale until you iron out the flaws in your firm.

5. There is no responsive design.

It’s less usual to come across a website that doesn’t use a responsive design than it formerly was, yet it still happens. Your website must work properly on whatever device that is used to access it.

At least 51% of individuals currently use their smartphones to make purchases, and the figure is growing. Mobile expenditure now accounts for a whopping 21% of all online spending.

Unless novel design is key to your brand, one of the main reasons to use a well-tested theme with just minimal customizations is that this is one of the main reasons to use a well-tested theme with only minor customizations. Use Google’s mobile-friendly test to ensure your theme is mobile-friendly, then stress test it on as many devices as you can.

I cannot emphasise enough the importance of placing a test order from a mobile device. On mobile, a shopping cart will frequently appear to be functional but will not really submit an order.

6. There is no defined target audience

Consumers need a reason to shop with you rather than Amazon, and one of the most important factors is culture. You must identify a specialised target and acquire that audience’s trust if you want to beat the ecommerce behemoth.

A customer profile, a portrait of your ideal customer and the circumstances that will drive them to you, is at the heart of this. This includes the following:

• i) An awareness of their passions.
• ii) Any subcultures to which they may belong.
• iii) They have values that are very important to them.
• iv) They have needs that your product fills.
• v) They “hang around” at these places.

The only way to do this properly is to use a combination of data analysis and intuition, ideally with some real-world dialogues. You will be able to connect better if you are more concentrated.

Source: online business , online business ideas