The competitive eCommerce industry demands that your website offers a seamless user experience, pristine display of products and services, and a website design that maximizes your customer’s time and minimizes shopping cart abandonment. And, those expectations are just so you can compete against eCommerce giants! With the right strategy, you can meet these high expectations by displaying a website with rich features that will help increase sales and implementing best practices that will minimize shopping stress for your customer. Additionally, we encourage you to avoid making these 5 mistakes with your eCommerce website:
1. Complicated Navigation
Imagine walking into a massive store – IKEA, for example — but there are no aisles or obvious ways to walk through the store. You’d probably get overwhelmed and turn around and leave right away. This is what happens when a potential customer visits an eCommerce website with complicated navigation. The maximum amount of energy your potential customer expends on his buyer journey should be in the research phase. All roads that lead to said product must be smooth and effortless. Here are a few ways you can ensure a seamless navigation:
- Exhibit specific categories on main page – i.e. Products, services, about us, & contact
- Follow the 3 click rule – can your customer find what he needs in 3 clicks?
- Install an internal search function
- Make hypertext stand out from regular text
- Mobile-friendly navigation
- Simplify your navigation bar
Your website’s navigation must be user-friendly to convert customers, minimize bounce rates, and decrease your shopping cart abandonment percentage.
2. Using the Wrong eCommerce Platform
An eCommerce platform acts as the foundation of your website and choosing the wrong platform can be devastating to your business growth. The wrong eCommerce platform can lower your conversion rate, cause revenue loss, present security problems, display a poor design, and more. When you are searching for the right eCommerce platform – or interviewing different companies to build and create your website – consider the answers to these questions:
- What is my budget and expectations?
- Do I have the time and knowledge to update my website regularly?
- What tools will my eCommerce platform need to integrate with?
- Is a templated design or a custom design more important to me?
- What do my customers expect from my website?
- Do I need my website to serve as a business growth tool?
- What role will my website play in the products and services I offer?
The minimal monthly fee that is attached to many DIY eCommerce platforms may be enticing, but you will spend countless hours trying to create a website that is just right. Eventually, you might ditch the DIY eCommerce platform altogether due to the frustration and endless responsibilities. Instead, we encourage you to partner with a marketing team to create a stunning website from the beginning!
3. Not Understanding Your Target Audience
You need to understand your target audience before your website comes to fruition because every detail in your website should reflect the characteristics of your target audience. For example, a law firm that handles high-end business disputes will have very different content, colors, and overall website feel than a boutique shop that sells tween clothes and jewelry. To get a better understanding of your target audience and how to reach them, research their pain points, values, past solutions they’ve tried, what type of language resonates with them, and where they find content online.
4. Not Fixing SEO Errors
There are two obvious places SEO errors can occur – in your content or in your website’s backend. When SEO first made its debut, search engines sought out keywords and keyphrases in website content to populate results when a user did a search. This quickly led to people keyword stuffing their content pages to get to the top of search engine result pages instead of writing in a natural, user-friendly way. Search engines have adopted new criteria, finding results that have SEO written throughout in an organic way. In simple terms, make sure you are writing your website content for people with SEO in mind, not search engines.
SEO errors can also occur in technical forms – pages no longer existing (404 error), redirecting the user to a different page (301 or 302 error), or identical versions of the same page. This can cause your potential customer to lose trust in your website and/or company, and instead of trying to find the right page, he will look elsewhere for a solution to his problem.
5. Straying from Brand Identity
Once you’ve developed your brand identity, it must be woven into every product, apparel, signage, business card, and other marketing efforts you do. A great brand can add personality to your company, provide consistency to your customers, help you stand out from the competition, and help build customer loyalty. If you stray from your brand, your customer won’t know what to expect from your product or service. For example, if Target started labeling some products with a blue logo instead of their rich red color, you may think it’s a knock off brand.
M&R Marketing Can Create Your User-Friendly eCommerce Website!
These mistakes can be devastating to your company. We know you’ve worked hard to create and maintain your company, so why settle for a DIY eCommerce website when you could partner with a premier marketing agency? From creating your user-friendly websites, to writing your website content, to creating your custom logo (and everything in between), our team wants to help bring your vision to life! Are you ready to learn more? Reach out to our team with questions: 478-621-4491.
If you missed parts one and two of our eCommerce website series, make sure to check them out:
- Part 1 – 6 eCommerce Website Design Features that can Increase Sales
- Part 2 – How to Create a Stress-free Shopping Experience on Your eCommerce Website
- Part 3 – 5 Critical Mistakes to Avoid in Your eCommerce Website