By Michael Zhou

The world of ecommerce is booming and will continue to boom with platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay. The convenience of being able to purchase something then have it delivered the next day or that week helps save time. Going to a physical store can spend your time without guaranteeing that they have a product or the product in the desired size or color. Ecommerce sites do not have to be enormous or a household name to thrive as finding a specific niche and succeeding can be immensely profitable. Taking a proactive approach can allow an ecommerce store to help avoid certain issues that will hurt business. The following are how to prevent these issues and deal with them if prevention simply was not enough.

Design of Site Not Intuitive for Users

The design of the website needs to be done by a professional as you need the online store to be as intuitive as possible for the target demographic. Searching web design Burlington or Boston can help find some of the best designers in your local area. Being able to search for products needs to be as easy as possible as many people go to a specific online store to purchase a very specific product. If it takes the visitor 20 minutes to find this product they will probably opt for a much easier to navigate ecommerce site.

Vendor or Popular Product Out of Stock

Keeping your most popular products in stock is imperative as these are the main sources for revenue. For this reason you need to have multiple wholesalers even if their prices vary. You need to keep these products in stock even if they might not have their usual margins. For example, people order nutritional supplements monthly or bimonthly, keep customers happy while one vendor is out of stock is imperative. As long as there is a healthy margin keep the prices at the same rate until your normal vendor has a product back in stock. Dropping vendors for frequently being out of stock is wise as scrambling last minute to find a product should not be done as a vendor should have clear communication if they cannot fulfill as regular order.

Unreliable Host Lets Site Go Down During Peak Hours

There are plenty of ecommerce stores that have a seasonal appeal like that of costume stores. A store like this going down the week before Halloween can impact profits for the entire year. Do not take the cheap route when it comes to your hosting service as you also do not want the site to go down due to the server not being able to handle massive amounts of traffic. Take a look at the different options and always make sure that there is 24 hour a day 365 days a year support. Being able to get the site back up within a few minutes can minimize the amount of sales lost due to this issue. Most loyal customers will check back in a few hours so this is a positive but new customers might never return unless the store has something that cannot be found elsewhere.

Long Checkout Process Losing Sales Daily

The checkout process taking too long can lead to a customer having a flash of buyer’s remorse and opting out of the sale. For those customers that leave the product in their cart a coupon should be sent to make this sale as everyone likes thinking they have gotten a good deal. The one thing that should not be sacrificed in order to make the checkout process shorter and easier is that of the security of this process. A data leak of customer information can cripple ecommerce sites of all sizes as losing customer trust is negative to say the least. Take a look at some of the largest ecommerce sites to see how they have shortened the checkout process and model yours after this.

Product Copy Lower Quality Than Direct Competitors

The detail that can draw a buyer in is the product description being lower quality than competitor. There are going to be certain specifics that a buyer is looking for and although a product might have it, not mentioning this can lead the customer to go elsewhere. At times an ecommerce competitor will enlist the help of a content creation company that has freelancers or contractors that specialize in product copy. Finding one of these professionals on a freelancer platform like Upwork can lead to a fruitful relationship where they have consistent work and conversions increase for the online store. Website copy is just as important as something as simple as poor grammar or misspelling can make the website look illegitimate or a fraud looking to scam customers.

Take care of the above issues and increase the chances that your ecommerce site will thrive for years to come. Consistent maintenance on the site as well as offsite marketing can help a business continue to grow.

Michael Zhou is a Senior VP of Business Intelligence Development and has assisted the Fortune 1000 company with expertise in the web as a whole, including ground-zero marketing efforts that benefit both consumer and vendor. He is also contributor on Esprittoday.

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