Why your eCommerce site is down in the dumps

So, you’ve finally got an online site for your brick and mortar store – that’s great. You’ve entered all of your products, uploaded images, provided detailed descriptions. but why isn’t anyone buying from your site? Here’s a list of some of the most common reasons your site is failing to meet your expectations.

Unreasonable Expectations: If you think you’re going to make a site and sit by as the customers roll in, you’re sadly mistaken. Just like your regular store, it takes time and effort to get customers to your site. Without buying advertising, you could be waiting a long, long time for your first customers.

Higher Prices: In the on-line world of eCommerce, pricing competition is fierce! People expect to pay less for online goods, that’s why auction sites are making billions. If you can’t lower prices because of manufacturer guidelines, use incentives like free shipping. Your prices need to be better than your competitor to get the customers to come to you.

Bad Words: No, I don’t mean cursing, but bad marketing terms and slogans. Avoid negative words, even in negative situations. Instead of ‘bad credit card information’, use ‘incorrect’. Push the positive, rather than up the negative. A product should never be ‘not hard to use’, it should be ‘easy to use’.

Checkout: You can have great prices, free shipping and every positive word you can use, but you can loose a customer at checkout. If your checkout is more than 3 steps, you need to eliminate or consolidate the process. Dogfunk.com is a great example of a 3 step checkout: log in/register, billing and confirmation. A fast, easy and intuitive checkout is going to get better results than a cumbersome and lengthy checkout.

Secure Checkout: Without a SSL, you might as well close the site. Sure, you may get a few customers, but without a secure checkout, you will lose many customers. SSL is reasonably priced and usually won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Shipping: Your customers want to know how much they’re going to be charged for shipping before they begin the checkout process. They also want to know how long it will take for their package to arrive. I’ve always felt, the best way to deal with this is to have free shipping. Free shipping is a great incentive for your customers and if you want to compete with selling the same products as the big boys, you need to have free shipping as an option.

Navigation: Your site may look great, but is it intuitive and easy to navigate? Too often, a great site can be brought down by poor navigation.Left side links for shopping is the defacto standard; learn it, live it – love it.