Whatever product or service your website offers, the Internet offers you the opportunity to reach out to the global market and has the potential to offer equal opportunities to all companies big and small irrespective of what their balance sheets say about them. The internet helps you to reach customers around the world who can conveniently buy from your online storefront 24/7/365.
But in the competitive world of the Web, growing your business and increasing your profits online requires careful planning and important steps. For every successful e-commerce business, there are dozens that fail because they don’t address basic risks and pitfalls along the way. The following list helps your online store to have a solid base that covers the major pitfalls to avoid in setting an e-commerce .
The Main Checklist for avoiding any pitfalls in setting up an e-commerce Site are:
1. Complicated Checkout: Don’t over complicate the checkout process of your customers, keep it simple as possible, and try not to ask too much information, just the necessary information to carry out the transaction should be sufficient.
2. Bad Payment Gateway: Use a payment gateway that your customers feel comfortable with and a one, which is secure and verified.
3. Information Overload– Keep the site simple and straightforward, do not over do it with too much information and overcrowded designs.
4. No Product Information: State clearly what your customers will be getting, in the description, to avoid any disappointments.
5. Not having a good return policy & terms: Your customers cant’t visualise and feel the product; you cannot afford to have a good return policy, this will give them that slight more assurance in your product.
6. Not Securing Your Site: If your going to be capturing customers details directly on your site, you need to ensure that your site is secure, you can buy an SSL certificate, which will give your customers a peace of mind that their data is secure and encrypted.
7. No Products on home page: Your home page is your shop window, this is what most of your visitors will see first, make use of this page, by promoting your top selling products, sales offers, and other products on your site.
8. Slow Loading Speed: E-commerce sites can be quite heavy in files to load up, as there are lots of modules and features to display, ensure that your site loads up in a good speed, by optimizing the coding along with investing into a good hosting server.
9. Poor SEO & Marketing: Once your site is live, you want to make sure that it ranks well, and that search engines can index your site with ease, by not having a good SEO and Marketing plan in place, you will not be doing justice to your site. Invest into a good SEO company to carry out SEO work on your site.
10. Not Up Selling: When a visitor of your site has made a commitment to buy, they are interested in your products, and like what you are offering, take this opportunity to up sell the other products, the best way to do this, is during the checkout stages have a section for “other products you may be interested in” or you can display related products when they are on your product detail page.
If the above points are kept in mind while setting up the online business then it at least ensures the features of Speed , Security and Simplicity which all add value to the whole online user experience. As no site has any value until the user experience is at the nucleus of the whole site.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
10 Mistakes To Avoid In Setting Up An E-commerce Site
