Some mistakes are easy to forgive, but others can cost you thousands of dollars. Building an ecommerce website often involves the same types of elements, but there are still costly design blunders that give amateur e-entrepreneurs away.
Many business owners who set up ecommerce websites just follow a template and expect the cash to roll in and sales to rise. This is a mistake that can cost you time and revenue. Investing in a professional web design and development company can help you create the best website you can have, regardless of what budget you are on. But keep an eye out for these costly ecommerce mistakes.
No Search Function
Think of your ecommerce site catalog as aisles, with products stretching as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, you do not have anyone to helpfully point out where the medicines are, or where the organic cereal is on an ecommerce site. This is why a customized search function is very important. Many customers hunt for the best type of deal online and they often have a concrete idea of budget, style, color and what specific product they are looking for.
In a lot of cases, the lack of search functions causes shopping cart abandonment even before your customers reach the shopping cart phase of shopping, simply because they cannot find what they are looking for.
Another website design flaw is the lack of ability to categorize items or refine searches. Make sure your inventory is clearly defined and make sure your customers can find products with one (or two) clicks.
Small Fonts/Illegible Typography
This is a novice mistake that can easily be rectified by a few hours of testing, but many entrepreneurs new to ecommerce present their products with text so small it is illegible. Do not force your customers to hunt for their reading glasses, make sure your fonts are easy to read. A good test to check your website is to stand a few feet away from your monitor and see if you can read your text. A good font size is normally between 12px to 14px.
Make sure that you also leave enough white space on your design. Sometimes the issue is not how big or small the font size is, but how much you have crammed into the front page of your site. Give your customer's eye time to rest and move.
Extreme Registration
Great ecommerce sites allow you to register in less than 3 minutes -- without asking for unnecessary information. Bad ecommerce sites run you through the gamut, and make the experience something you have no desire to repeat. They neglect to auto-populate fields with questions the customer has already answered before, forcing them to input information again and again.
Ask your customers to sign up only with necessary information -- do not interview them or create a survey-like sign up form. It is irritating. Instead, place a voluntary feedback survey elsewhere on the website and streamline your sign-up process.
Lack of Guarantee
Lacking a visible guarantee on the website will kill your sales, even if you have the best looking website online. Customers search for guarantees because they want to make sure they get quality items for their money. If they ask for overnight shipping and you provide it, it better get to where it has to be. Guarantees are also a way to help you help you customers in the event that they receive defective items and create a sense of assurance. Chances are, if you have high quality products, returns will never be a problem.
A clearly written policy on money back or returns should be visible on your website and customers should be able to read them in full. Because some customers really read them in full--especially when they order big-ticket or bulk items online.
Lack of Security
This is very simple: no SSL or encryption, no sales. Customers nowadays are extremely concerned about their online safety and extremely well versed in how to protect their information online. If your website has no security measures, chances are your sales are minimal to zero.
Does your ecommerce website have any of these issues? Fix them ASAP and watch your sales conversions skyrocket. Let them linger and watch your website fail. Unsure about how to go about the fixes? Ask a professional web development team to help you out!
