More and more brands everyday are getting onboard with ecommerce and with good reason. According to results from the Study of Online confidence, 96% of Spaniards are as or more confident to shop online than 5 years ago. In fact, 20 million Spaniards purchased a product or service online during the year 2015. This is great news for companies who are going digital!
If you have an online store, however, it is possible that you are missing out on sales opportunities without even knowing it. There are a lot of factors that influence ecommerce success, and it can be difficult to have them all under control from the beginning. For this reason, for you to profit from your business from the word go, I would like to tell you about the 5 deadly online sales mistakes.
If your strategy consists in waiting for your clients to find you on Google… you can keep waiting. It will take at least 3 to 6 months from the moment you open your online store until search engines begin to show you in their results, and the competition is very high. If you don’t want to lose online sales, you need to have a digital marketing plan to make yourself known from the first day:
For your ecommerce to be successful, you should take your users’ consumption habits on the internet into account. If someone is interested in buying your product, you can be almost certain that they will have compared different places where they can purchase the product to see which one they prefer. If they ask you a specific question about your product or delivery, you’ve almost got them! But that also usually means they are excited to buy the product or/and in a rush, so if you take too long to answer they will most likely decide to purchase from someone else.
The same thing happens when a user asks you about an incident in their purchase request. Speed is key here, for the client not only to feel satisfied with your service and complete their purchase, but to turn them into a loyal and returning customer. Acquiring new clients is much more costly than maintaining those you already have, so be sure to pay attention!
As human beings, we are the very embodiment of contradiction, and tend to be quite averse to being told what we must or must not do. Many people do not like at all having to register on an infinite amount of pages, especially if they fear we might send them Spam, so make it as easy as possible for them to get the information they need and even finalize a purchase without having to create an account. (In fact, so as to not lose online sales, the simpler the process of buying from your ecommerce, the better.)
There is, however, an exception to this rule: the cases in which you are aiming to obtain leads by offering quality content in exchange for filling in a form. This is an very valid strategy, but remember that before using it you need to gain your potential user’s trust. And do not hesitate to inform them about your emailing policy, to give them some peace of mind.
The only thing your users know about you is what they see: your website. If it is full of mistakes or errors, it will not transmit any kind of trust and will very easily lose you a great amount of online sales. So do not forget to run your website through a checklist every now and again and check up on whether or not you are having any of the following problems:
Did you know that mobile traffic has already overtaken that from desktop? There is still a certain amount of resistance towards online purchasing from smartphones, but these devices are used frequently in the investigation and comparison phases. So, if you do not want to lose online sales, your website should be able to be viewed in perfection from desktops, smartphones and tablets alike. And the same goes for your email marketing templates.
These are all of my recommendations so far, but if you would like some help in avoiding these deadly mistakes, remember that we are always available here at Cyberclick to help you out and avoid losing online sales! :)