Owning an e-commerce store can get rewarding and frustrating at the same time. With their ever-growing popularity, online stores are nothing short of God’s answer to the people’s prayers who want to experience the convenience of shopping on the go. People who are just content with the high-resolution images and detailed descriptions provided by the online merchants despite seeing or feeling them in person before purchasing.
However, running an online store is not as easy as starting one, there are several ways you can ruin yours’s simply by ignoring what you thought were small insignificant things, those very things can cost big for your company. Below we will talk about 5 such ways you can ruin your e-commerce store– and how to avoid them.
Step 1. By Choosing the Wrong E-Commerce Platform
This one is for startups. While opening an online store, you will often be confronted by many options. However, as good as these platforms seem, choosing the wrong one could be detrimental. Just keep in mind that what works for one company may not work for another. For e.g.
- Magento maintenance mode offers even the least technical users with the ease to maintain his Magento store on a regular basis thus saving big on costs.
- Woocommerce is a free WordPress plugin which is easy to use and offers a lot of flexibility along with many customization options to choose from.
- Shopify website design offers hundreds of professional themes to choose from many of which have been designed by World’s renowned designers.
And many more…
In the end, it all comes down to your needs. So, carry out a thorough research beforehand and select the one that best fulfils your requirements.
Step 2. By Neglecting Mobile and Tablet Users
Another sure shot way of bringing doom to your online business is by cutting off the mobile users completely by opting for non-responsive website design that fails to adjust to different screen resolutions.
Sincea recent move by Google is to prioritise mobile indexing over desktopand the mobile e-commerce market, which is expected to surpass $693 billion dollars by 2019, neglecting mobile and tablet users should never be an option.
Step 3. By Excluding Social Media from your Marketing Strategy
Another step towards your webstore’s downfall is by still clinging to outdated methods of marketing and excluding social media strategy without realising how influential and far-reaching it can get for your business.
As you are already aware, spending time on social media is still the guilty pleasure of many. So, offering online customers, a chance to follow your e-commerce store on social networking giants can be the next best thing you can do for your business.
Step 4. By Ignoring Customer Care Services
Since you are not running a brick and mortar store, ignoring your customer support services is not an option for you as your customer care department serves as the only human link between your business and customers.
Try adopting a policy of proactive customer support to keep your customers happy and loyal instead of going for a damage control strategy at a later stage. Ever heard of ‘Prevention is better than cure’? Well, time to put it in practice.
Step 5. By Providing Bad User Experience/Interface
The last certain way of driving your online customers away is by delivering a poor UX/UI, neglecting the age-old saying ‘a nice dress helps to impress’ in the process. Not sure how you are jeopardising your user’s experiences? Let’s check it out-
- By providing low-quality images
- Overuse of pop-ups
- Keeping your site navigation and search cluttered
- Hiding your contact info
- Complicated procedure for checkout
- Misleading/missing content
Conclusion
These are the top five steps you can take, either to completely ruin your e-commerce store or to learn lessons and avoid these mistakes with a little awareness and open-mindedness to see your business thrive in due time.
