When we decide on starting a new online store, we always start from an idea and an initial conviction: “I want to sell!” and “I know how I want to sell it and where?” But often these initial premises are part of our surrealism, which we confuse with reality, and this leads us to make mistakes. Below we detail the 5 most common and important errors and how we can resolve them.
Mistake #1: Not trusting your initial idea in a professional
It is the most common idea. You are unemployed, a stage in your life has ended and you think about incorporating a new line from which you can obtain benefits, and you can make it your new profession. The first thing that comes to your mind is an online store. Once you have the product you want to sell, you search the internet for different possibilities to make the online store yourself. You have little budget and you start to design it little by little. But everything that glitters is not gold.
If you do not rely on a professional, you will not know more or less true science whether what you are going to sell can be successful on the Internet, and above all, analyze the competition, but not only in quantitative terms, but also qualitatively. For this, it is important that a consultant guides you in this process to know which product you want to sell.
If you already have it clear, the professional will help you plan a good strategy that will surely mark the success of your online business.
Solution: Trust this section of the project to someone who will help you define this strategy and plan some objectives.
Mistake #2: Creating the online store all by yourself
Together with the previous one, it can be the most common of errors. If you have knowledge of html or php and have experience in E-commerce design with Prestashop or Magento or custom project, you can do it without problems. But often you do not have that knowledge and are likely to face problems in programming. This will leave your project stagnant, and you will lose valuable time and money which you could have used for other necessities of higher priority.
Additionally, the design of a website or, in this case, an E-commerce portal, must have a professional design. It must have professional images of the company, brand, and products, and include appropriate sliders and banners. You are more than likely to face problems while accomplishing this. You may think: “Well, I buy a photo, I retouch it with Photoshop or any other photo retouching program and I’m done …” But without experience, all you can get is a poor image and nothing professional about your page, leading to premature failure of the project.
Solution: Ask a professional for a quote to help you design your online store in an appropriate manner.
Mistake #3: Ignoring the need for a blog
Today we can see thousands of online stores which do not have an associated marketing blog, or which have a blog but do not update the content. When we talk about the Internet, a blog gives you an authentic communication opportunity, and above all, it will cause Google to detect continuous updates in your project and therefore position you better than the competition.
Why do I need a blog? You need it for the following reasons:
- Generate updateable and original content
- Offer added value to your products
- Attract loyal customers and make them a part of your Project
- Convergence and sharing on social networks (often sharing a post that talks about a product or how to use a product is more effective than sharing the product itself with its price and other details)
Solution: Create a blog, publish content on a regular basis, use quality content that adds value to the product, which is not too commercial but rather offers free content and tricks.
Mistake #4: Not establishing a customer service strategy
This is one of the main causes for premature failure of a web project. You already managed to have the operative store, you already have customers, and they have already made purchases, but now what? We can automate most part of the “on-page” process, but the relationship with customers needs to have a personal touch. Your brand is not Amazon or any super famous E-commerce store, not at least at the moment; so everything must be very clear to generate trust. The clients will have thousands of questions that you will have to answer.
Solution: You can ask the customer to refer a specific post on your website or blog that clarifies points about the issue in question. Your other tasks will include:
- Answer customer calls with questions about products
- Be able to modify orders based on the modifications that may arise until the product is shipped
- Offer personalized information about the product, when it will arrive and in what way
- If there are problems with the shipment, try to talk to the customer and solve the problem.
- Offer some incentive to dissatisfied customers to return to buy on your website. (However dissatisfied you are, if you have a discount on a product you need, you will not hesitate to buy it and give yourself another chance.
Mistake #5: Not being aware of what web analytics can do for you
You may be obsessed with the number of visits, but that obsession does not let you see further. Knowing the people who enter our website, is very positive, but it is useless.
Solution: Dig deeper into various other details like:
- From where the visits come
- People from which provinces or states or countries buy more
- Which devices people use for the purchase
- Average cost of transactions
- Know where people leave the buying process and try to launch a testable hypothesis on why they abandon it
- Know at what times more purchases are made
- What social networks work best for you
- Check the effectiveness of advertising banners
- Measure the effectiveness of AdWords
- Measure the effectiveness of SEO
And this is just a very small example of what can be measured. That is why it is very important to find out not only what users do on your website but also why they do it.
There are many other bad practices which you find in e-commerce but these are the most important ones. There may be another point that focuses on advertising, yet another in the SEO section, getting followers, messaging, order management, or in the POS but that will make for another article.
So, which aspect is most important for you? Do let us know through comments below.
