Top Ten E-Commerce Mistakes

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By Jeff Ropelato

1. Weak Site Design

The first thing a potential customer sees is your websites design. All the elements of your web site's design - navigational structure, product presentation, copy and testimonials, proof of security - all mix together to give your visitors an overall impression of your business.

2. Site Usability Inadequate

Make sure the sites purpose is clear. This means explaining what your site is about. Help the customers find what they need. This involves making everything obvious, ensuring that every link and tool is accessible on every page. Your customers should be able to see your best material right away.

3. Obstacles to Shopping

There are several reasons that customers will leave your site looking for another in a heartbeat. If you confuse them with your navigational structure, ask to many personal questions, make it difficult to order, credit card fears, download time, and most of all not having a professional trustworthy website feel.

4. No Marketing Plan

There are millions of websites out there, with millions of potential customers. What will you do to drive sales to your site? You need to have a good marketing strategy. Which should include search engine optimization; pay per clicks, pop-under's, banner ads, and affiliates just to name a few.

5. Poor Customer Service

After doing this review of shopping carts, I can tell you how much customer service affects your business. There were hundreds of shopping carts to choose from to review. One of the major review criteria to separate the different carts was how well there customer service was. I thought this would be so obvious it would not be worth mentioning, but still company's have along way to go in satisfying this need.

6. Not Every Product can be Sold on the Internet

All products were not meant to be sold online. There are a lot of reasons why some products sell online and others don't. First, shipping costs for large products can became very expensive. Allot of time people shopping for shoes, and clothing prefer to try this items on before buying. Food items have the chance for spoiling, and fragile items are easily broken in shipping. You need to investigate a lot in the products you are selling before deciding to go online.

7. Failure to Prepare for Success

Many online businesses became successful in a very short period of time. Do you have a plan to deal with sudden massive orders of your products? Are you planning ahead for increased web traffic, which could cause bandwidth problems? There are many things to consider before selling online. What seems like a great deal for a shopping cart right now might not be able to handle your orders in a few months.

8. Slow Shipping

Working out true and fast shipping methods is key to keeping your cliental. What every your shipping standards are you need to keep them. If you say it will be there before Christmas, it needs to be there before Christmas. Not receiving there product on time will not only loss you customers by will scar you with a bad reputation.

9. Specialization

Not every business can become an amazon.com right at the first. You will need to specialize in a certain product to build up a good reputation. Reputation is a key ingredient to have any clout in the online world.

10. Security

Making your site as secure as possible is a must. We live in a day an age were electronic theft and sabotage is used more and more. Protecting your customer's credit card information is vital. Another thing that is over looked when it comes to security is protecting your client's information. Such as e-mail address, billing address, phone numbers, and anything else that is required of them. Identity theft can come from this information as easily as credit card theft.