Ecommerce Mistakes That May Break Your Business

We often talk about how to do everything right, discuss successful cases, look for ways to improve our service and become faster, higher, stronger and, ultimately, richer. The topic of errors and fatal irregularities in e-commerce is completely undeservedly ignored. In the end, one mistake is remembered firmly by customers and can very seriously affect the reputation of a store or service.
So, a brief guide to errors and problems that can pretty much spoil your business metrics.

Non-Trustful Website Design
Before buying anything, any person visually evaluates the seller and the store (in this case, your site). A professional, trustworthy electronic store should not look like you are working from a garage (even if you actually work from there).
How to fix? Invest in website design and development. This is your face, your tool and your platform for communication with the user, therefore creating a pleasant and understandable design is an invaluable manifestation of courtesy and attention to the buyer.

Let your contact details, the name of the organization and other data that will help the user understand who is behind this site will be available on the site. Put security certificates in a prominent place, studies show that this works great.

Poor navigation
When a user first visits a site, he is only interested in the ability to quickly and easily find the information he needs. Before making a purchase, a person needs the opportunity to get to the right product, and this can be difficult. Lack of search capabilities, broken search or obscure navigation instantly drives your customers off the site. A study by Nielsen Norman Group shows that even when everything is done correctly on the site, only 64% of visitors find what they came for.

The steps to remedy this situation are clear: repair the search, configure a lot of filters and offer similar and related products. Also, do not forget to do the same for mobile devices so that making purchases is equally convenient both from the phone and from the computer.

Lack of transparent information on methods of payment, delivery and return of goods
The main irritant on the sites of electronic stores is the inability to determine how much delivery will cost. And hidden payments, which the user may not even know about before ordering, spoil karma and lead customers to your competitors. As a result, no one wants to pay more than what was indicated in the price list for a product or service.

In order not to frighten off buyers with excessive mystery, post the most detailed information about the cost and delivery methods, all possible payments and the conditions for returning the goods. Consider free shipping: studies show that it is preferable and may be an incentive to purchase for 73-93% of the audience. In order not to lose money on delivery, you need to calculate the index, how much you need to sell in order to recoup the free delivery. Perhaps you should lay it in the price of the goods or offer a minimum order amount for free delivery. It is not necessary to offer it all year round, it is quite effective to use it as an instrument of a marketing campaign. In addition, the ability to not pay for shipping can be a great bonus for regular customers. In general, there is a huge scope for creativity.

The shopping process is complicated and boring.
Surely, each of you had the following story: you are looking for something like that, you click on the first link that you get, you try to order, and here you are presented with the first task of a multi-level quest - to fill out a whole sheet of forms and checkboxes to register . The drama begins when you click “done” and it turns out that some required field is left blank. Often, you find yourself on a page with clean, like spring water, uncomplicated form for 36 questions, including riddles and a trigonometric formula that you need to fill out again. In such situations, I usually close the tab and try not to return to the site of this store. We are not immortal, alas, we do not always have time to re-register on the site selling toasters.

Or here's another situation, I go to the site for the first time and find there a number of interesting products that I add to the basket. Naturally, when I make a purchase, they ask me to register, I successfully defeat the form and find myself in front of an empty basket. We need to again go around the site and remember what exactly was in the basket and how to find it.
And the third irritant - when placing an order there is no sign that it was successful and something is happening with the order.

Each of these situations can be avoided. To solve the problem of the disappearance of information and the mysterious emptying of the shopping basket, you need a persistent shopping cart. It will not only save the nerves of new customers, but also help to increase the volume of purchases of regular visitors. People often add goods to the basket that they return to later and buy them. If they remain in the basket after leaving the site (authorization on the site), the person will not forget that he wanted to buy and probably will buy it all the same. Well, if you need a registration form, you just need to optimize it to the minimum and, of course, save already completed fields in the cache.

Not enough product information.
When we go offline shopping, we can twist each product in our hands, turn it on, turn it off, press all buttons, smell it, shake it, read the box, look at the labels, seams, material and color. On the Internet, this is often not enough, but it happens that the site has only one tiny picture of the product and a description like “a stylish and powerful smartphone that will become your assistant and fashion accessory”. Science fiction writer Max Fry begins one of the books with the words “you never know where you're lucky.” Online shopping puts us in a similar but reverse situation - the buyer never knows what kind of defect he overlooked this time. Returning goods is laziness and hassle, because online stores are generating dissatisfied customers who will go to the regular store for the next mixer, where they can be examined and tested.

Product information is never too much. Everything will come in handy here: videos, reviews, photographs under different lighting and from different angles, macro photos, eyewitness accounts, articles, presentations, pdf with instructions and box images. And some clothing and accessories stores let you upload your photo and “try on” products online. Moreover, the idea is not new, back in 1999 I had a CD with the Cosmopolitan program, in which I could experiment with hairstyles and make-up on my photo.

Silent or useless call center and online assistant
The fact that a site visitor has the opportunity to chat with a living person (whether it is a call center operator, an online assistant or a secretary at info @ info ...) implies that this person is needed to solve problems that a computer cannot solve . That is, a call center operator who has a list of prepared phrases can be completely replaced with a script with the same list. Let your operators on the phone be few, but it should be employees authorized to make some decisions and help customers with the first call / message.

Unobvious store rules.
It would be nice to concentrate all the rules according to which the store operates in one place, for example, in the form of a FAQ Delivery terms and regions, a link to an offer agreement, restrictions and conditions for promotions, discounts, loyalty programs, conditions for joining a loyalty program - a person is full of questions, and By answering them online, you will unload your sales managers and delight customers with the order and clarity of your relationship with him.

Few service options
And again, two stories from personal experience. The first is about buying a gift for a person located in another city. It turns out that even a very large and pathos home appliance store is not able to make a purchase as a gift. That is, if I ordered a double boiler from my account, they will be called to me upon delivery. And they will ask me about a convenient time. Also, I was surprised to find that very few stores are able to wrap their goods in gift wrapping. Seriously, sometimes I really want to send to my mother not just a box with products, but a gift. Beautiful with a postcard.

The second story, again about household appliances. Until recently, I had never encountered buying an electric stove in the kitchen. And I have to admit, I was mentally unprepared for the fact that two big smiling guys brought the sparkling plate on time, without a single defect at a reasonable price, and upon examination, I did not find a power cord in it. I ask the couriers, they say, guys, where is the cord? The guys laugh, send me to the radio market, they say, take the cord and plug, solder and ready. Indeed, of course.
And in the first and second cases, the store would have earned money and my personal sympathy points if I had thought about such problems in advance. Why, when selling the stove, do not specify the need for installation? After all, it can be offered as an additional option, most people will be, at least, grateful.

On this, of course, the possibilities to fail a business are not limited, but these errors and problems are the most common and painful.
Is there anything to add to the list? Share in the comments.