18 Deadly eCommerce Mistakes I See Online sellers Make
By: Amine Ben Yahmed
Tags: Ecommerce, Online, Online Marketing, Online Business, Online Shopping

18 Deadly eCommerce Mistakes I See Online sellers Make

Sometimes you’re on the up, and other times you face obstacles that stop your progress and push you down.

That’s why you need to prepare yourself for success by finding out the perfect tools and avoiding common mistakes that other online sellers make on their journey.

With that being said, I have compiled a list of the most common mistakes I see both newbie and experienced esellers make all the time so that you don’t run into the same problems in your businesses.

1. Not defining a target audience

One of the biggest mistakes an online seller can make is not clearly defining their target audience.

If you are selling multiple products, you have a high variety of customer targets. But every target has different behaviors, needs, perceptions. If you treat all of them in the same way you will, unfortunately, lose many of them.

That’s why you need to know who your targets are before they even know you exist.

To do that, You’ll need to take a deep dive into the market research to ensure that:

Your targets require your products You identify all of their needs You understand their pain points

4. You Know what solutions they’ve tried in the past (and why they haven’t worked)

5. You know how to promote your offer in a language they will understand

6. You can create a marketing strategy that puts your potential customers front and center

This valuable information will help you to target the right people and communicate why your products stand out from those of your competitors.

2 . Focusing on being lowest in market

Many retailers believe that the lowest prices will lead to higher sales. But setting the lowest prices will bring out new problematic outcomes.

In fact, It is impossible to cut your prices under your competitors every time. At one point, you will start losing money even if you have a high number of orders.

On top of that, Setting too low prices can make your products cheap in terms of quality in the minds of conscious consumers.

3. Choosing the wrong eCommerce platform

Your eCommerce platform can truly develop (or kill ) your business.

It not only determines how you will show your products and sell to shoppers, but it also plays a crucial role in how you attract visitors, and how you develop your business over time.

With that being said before you choose a certain platform take your time to consider the following factors:

products you plan to offer

How you plan to scale your business

How much control you want to have over your online store

What tools your platform needs to integrate with

Your budget

Whether you want a templated design or a custom design

What kind of experience your customers are looking for

4. Having an unclear marketing funnel

Marketing funnels are too complex, but the concept is simple. You need to drive attention, pique interest, create the desire for your product, and sell the product.

It’s called a marketing funnel because potential shoppers go in at the top and a handful passes through the funnel to become customers.

Take your time to develop each of the four steps above:

Draw attention.

Pique interest.

Create desire.

Sell the product.

Make sure that your online store has a clear plan to push people from attention to interest to desire to sell. This is your marketing funnel and it needs to be pretty clear.

5. Not having a strong brand message or identity

Creating a strong brand identity for your online store is a very very very important factor in its success. Effective branding can help you to build and develop your reputation, stand out from the crowd and highlight your values to attract your ideal shoppers.

Your products are not good enough to sell themselves. To create a thriving store, you will have to develop a strong brand identity that will be conducive to viral brand awareness.

6. Not being able to calculate the costs

Being able to calculate your costs is crucial.

Knowing them extremely well is so crucial to ensure that your prices will stay above your costs, so you can ensure the health of your business.

simple? Right?

Most online sellers think that the actual cost is mostly about the deals made with suppliers and ignore the rest of the costs. In e-commerce, product cost includes many other overhead costs. Like the employee cost, marketing cost shipping and fulfillment costs, or all other general operating costs.

You need to build a strong cost calculation tool that includes all invisible costs and adds them to the overall cost The rest is just setting the prices above the costs.

7. Launching first, validating second

Launching an eCommerce store before validating your ideas and products is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

Creating an MVP, generating a buzz via social media and digital magazines, and having early users are essential in the world of eCommerce.

8. Poor use of High Quality Images and videos

Clear, attractive and high quality images are a great drivers force for any online store.

Do you know why?

Because your potential customers are not able to directly check or test your products, imagery and video could help them to discern the quality of your products.

You can easily hire a talented photographer that can provide high-quality images on your store with better consideration over the lighting, product background, and photo editing.

You can also use a magnifying feature on your product images. That way, your customers can have the option to easily enlarge the photo and check the tinier details.

9. Not using category pages

As long as you offer several products on your eCommerce store, you need to create separate category pages as appropriate.

10. Providing a poor customer service

Reaching out to your customers and interacting with them is important to ensure your business success.

This can include how you answer shoppers messages through your online store. how you respond to questions and comments on social media, how you address customers’ complaints over the phone, and via email……

Every interaction counts, otherwise you will start losing existing clients and hinder getting new ones.

PS: Be aware that giving them great customer service can encourage them to come back to your online store. It will also develop your relationship with them, and make you a trustworthy brand.

11. Developing a complex shopping cart

According to several researches , around 69.57% of shoppers will add products to their shopping carts, and never buy them . This is known as the shopping cart abandonment rate, and it’s one of the biggest challenges online sellers can face.

One of the biggest reasons for shoppers abandoning their shopping cart is when the checkout process is too complex. If there are too many clicks, too much text, or if the process as a whole takes too much time, people will simply fail to complete the purchase

12. Providing bad shipping and fulfillment experience

63% of customers expected shipping in 5 days or less. That means items need to ship quickly and arrive intact. If you are unable to do this by fulfilling your own orders, it’s wise to outsource this mission to a company such as Fulfillment Bridge

13. Focusing on the wrong metrics

Make sure to improve the metrics that are most important to your business.

Here are the most important metrics for you to run a successful eCommerce store:

Impressions. Reach. Engagement. Email click-through-rate. Cost per acquisition (CPA). Organic acquisition traffic. Social media engagement. Abandonment. Micro to macro conversion rates. Average order value (AOV). Sales conversion rates. Customer Retention rate. Customer lifetime value (CLV). Repeat the customer rate. Refund and return rate. Ecommerce churn rate. Net promoter score (NPS) Subscription rate Program participation rate.

14. Ignoring privacy and security

Cybersecurity risks can represent the most dangerous risks for small online businesses. When your entire business operation is based around a website, you need to treat customer information with care. A leak of credit card information could destroy your business.

15. Ignoring content marketing

For some esellers just diving into the world of content marketing, many assume “blogging” to be the be.

But blogging is just one type of content, and should only be a part of your overall content marketing plan.

Among many, many other content types, there are :

Infographics

Podcasts

Webinars

Ebooks

Case Studies

Newsletters

Reports

Vlog

Videos

How to guides

Checklists

keep in mind that not everyone wants to read an article.

Some might prefer listening to podcasts; others might enjoy ebooks and white papers.

Make sure to know what your customers want, and focus on creating these types of content.

16. Lack of delivery options

You don’t want to lose business because of a lack of delivery options

Of course, not all shoppers want the same thing in terms of delivery and fulfillment. Some want their package to be delivered as soon as possible, no matter the cost; others don’t mind waiting a few extra days, as long as shipping is free; still others want to have a say in when, where, and how their products are delivered.

it’s nearly impossible to cover all of your customers’ needs in this aspect. But you certainly need to provide a variety of options that a) incentivize conversions, and don’t make you lose money.

17. Lack of social proof

Product reviews, testimonials, and referrals — are major drivers in terms of getting leads to convert. According to research by Spiegel Research Center almost 95% of online shoppers read first the customer reviews before knowing if they’ll buy the product or not

The best place to display your social is on your product pages

We’ve been using examples from relatively smaller eCommerce companies so far, but let’s take a page from the book of Amazon, here:

18. Lack of marketing or promotion

I believe that Social media is the easiest and most effective way to get more traffic to your online store. Nowadays, people are used to going through social media instead of search engines if they need something.

You can start promoting your products by creating an account for different social media platforms so you can target different people in your promotion.

I have already told you that succeeding in the world of eCommerce is not easy as it may seem.

With that being said, understanding the common mistakes made by online sellers can help you to avoid them, succeed and improve your business.