7 Deadly Mistakes You’re Making with Your Online Store That are Costing You

Today, with the right tools almost anyone can be an online ecommerce all-star. However, unless you’re intentional about how you construct and run your online store, it’s highly likely you’ll make simple mistakes that could seriously harm your brand. Don’t worry though; there’s good news. By learning to avoid these mistakes, you can win more customers, earn more sales, and boost your brand’s ecommerce growth.

7 Mistakes That May Be Impacting Your Online Store

Whether you’re an ecommerce professional or a complete beginner, making these 7 mistakes will damage your results. Are you guilty of any of them?

 

1. Ignoring the Competition

It goes without saying that if you’re like most businesses, you have competitors. What’s more, those competitors are out there trying to claim the same business you are. You need to pay attention to what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and how successful their efforts are.

Competitive analysis should be a large part of your launch strategy, but you should also conduct it regularly. To take a hands-off approach, use an alert system to let you know whenever your competition publishes a piece, targets a particular keyword, or develops a new item. This allows you to stay abreast of the competition and ensure you’re not missing out on obvious opportunities. We also recommend keeping an eye out on their social channels to see what they’re putting out, how their engaging and what approaches they’re taking.

 

2. Not Having a Solid Marketing Strategy

The key to a successful ecommerce store is a solid marketing strategy. If people can’t find your products, they don’t know they exist. Unsurprisingly, purchasing from you then becomes impossible. It’s critical to invest in a blended marketing strategy that includes SEO, social media, paid advertising and content creation. When you do this, you will enjoy the benefits of more customers, more sales, and more conversions. The keyword here is plan, make sure to map out your strategy and progress to stay organized and on top of what’s working and what isn’t.

Need help monitoring the performance of your ecommerce store? Vantage offers retailers a free analytics dashboard to gain insight into what is driving their growth, learn more.

 

3. Offering Little or No Customer Service

Customer service is one of the most critical aspects of a successful online store. If you don’t invest in great customer service, you can bet your clients will jump ship, sooner rather than later. According to HelpScout, 78% of customers have abandoned a cart or a transaction because of poor customer service. As if that weren’t enough, customers talk about bad customer service experiences twice as often as they do good customer service experiences, which means news of your company’s service shortcomings could go viral.

With that in mind, remember that customer service is essential to ecommerce growth. To succeed, you must adjust it according to your customers, the growth of your platform, and the suite of products you’ve chosen to offer.

 

4. Not Creating Buyer Personas

If you’re not creating buyer personas, you’re missing out on business you should be claiming. Buyer personas, or fictionalized people who closely represent your target customers, allow you to target your marketing message and product distribution, and ensure the people you’re trying to reach are paying attention.

If you’ve never created a marketing persona, now is the perfect time to develop a few for your brand (HubSpot’s guide can help). We recommend aiming to create between 2-4 different personas of your likely or desired customers. If you have marketing personas that are outdated or inaccurate, update them accordingly. Remember that your buyer personas can change with time, so it’s worth adjusting them every few years or even months.

 

5.  Not Creating a Unique Voice

For your online store to succeed, you need to create a unique voice. This differentiates your online store from those of your competitors and promotes brand recall. Creating a voice also serves to make your ecommerce brand more recognizable, and ensure that customers can pick you out in the online environment. Using a unique tone in your content helps to make your brand more fun and relatable. It makes people enjoy seeing your content come up on their Newsfeed and even want to share it with their friends.

Think of how brands like Dollar Shave Club and MeUndies have done this. There’s no mistaking these companies for anyone else.

 

For best results, use a fun or engaging tone that represents your brand and will strike a chord with customers.

 

6. Offering a Complicated Checkout Process

If you want people to do something as important as give you their money, you have to make it easy for them. This applies to your checkout process as much as it does everything else. Instead of asking customers to jump through a dozen hoops to purchase your product, make it fast and straightforward – people will be more likely to buy and more likely to recommend your site to others. A great and easy way to enable this is offering a guest checkout option. Less work, quicker transaction.

 

7. Poor Site Search Functionality

If you want customers to interact with your products, you need to make it easy for them to search your site. Excellent site functionality makes all the difference between a pleasing and a disappointing user experience, so be sure your platform is simple to navigate. For help, use a platform like Nextopia, which offers ecommerce site search and navigation services. Using a service like Nextopia can help increase conversions and customer satisfaction by ensuring that your customers can quickly find the products they want to buy.

 

A Better Ecommerce Store Starts Here

If you want your ecommerce store to succeed, it pays to follow these tips. In addition to making your store more navigable for customers, fixing common ecommerce mistakes will help decrease your abandoned cart rate, boost ecommerce growth, and create happy customers.