Online sellers have the most work to do when it comes to global competition. It is an ever-growing community of like-minded individuals chasing the same goal: to maximize their business’ exposure and to give the best user experience, which leads to higher conversion rates.
There are quite a few problems marketers face while running an eCommerce site. You can try overcome them by start acknowledging the fact that they do exist and that resolving them is probably much easier than you think.
The Most Common Problems Online Sellers Face and How to Fight Them
Communication and trust issues
Readers convert to buyers only under certain conditions – the first being an adaptive communication process. Numerous eCommerce sites opt to put the customer support service aside, thus creating a bigger problem: difficulty in gaining and retaining their customers.
Sometimes businesses show a lack of desire to answering the questions people have. While that practice saves them time, it doesn’t save the money in the long run. Soon after the questions stay unanswered, the potential customers tend to lose interest in your site and eventually walk away from it.
Therefore, consider simplifying the communication process. Your objective should be a quick response to inquiries with a touch of personalization. Also, give them multiple contact options like instant messaging, email, forum and a live chat.
Opinions matter. So in addition to multiple contact options, be sure to always ask for feedback. You have to show them you know how to ameliorate your services by directly asking for an opinion. For this, you can use a third-party review sites, such as Feefo or Trust Pilot.
The judgments of other customers are crucial to those who are still uncertain about their final decision. Offering them the best service will ensure you get positive feedback.
Another concern sellers face is connected directly to communication issues. That is losing trust among the ones who are already on your loyalty list. But why is that occurring in the first place?
Maybe your website doesn’t offer checkouts for visitors. Maybe it’s the extra fees which pop up out of nowhere before the checkout. Maybe it’s the nonexistent FAQs.
All of these inadequate practices lead to leaving a bitter taste in one’s mouth. Extra fees and lack of understanding will scare away those who matter you the most.
The trust factor that was hard to achieve can only deteriorate if they question your methods. You would want them to place their trust in your product or a service by presenting them as much information as they need.
Low conversion rates
Online sellers can fight global competition efficiently if their conversion rates are high. According to Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly, the global conversion rates climb up to only 4.28% in the last quarter of 2015.
Even though the general conversion rates seem quite low, your business can still grab the opportunity to raise them. If the visitors browse through your website but aren’t making any purchases, you should understand why they leave without buying.
Several reasons come to mind when thinking about this issue. Your homepage may be poorly designed. Or, the products you are selling aren’t described as accurately as they should be. Lastly, your returns policy may be unclear and leaves the customer confused.
The most important step to fight low conversion rates is to figure out the factors that caused the visitors to change their mind. Google Analytics is the best option available to start identifying your problems with using and leaving your site. This most widely used service helps you measure and monitor data and website traffic.
Shopping cart abandonment
Shopping cart abandonment indicates that the customer made the decision to pay for the chosen product, but for some reason, he left the purchasing process before finishing it. Cart abandonment can happen for an array of reasons, most common being:
Registration before the purchase – Not everyone wants to sign in to your website to be able to buy something. Sometimes the registration process itself is time-consuming if your site redirects the user to more than three other sites. Sometimes they feel their privacy is disrupted by asking too many details.
Accepting only one type of payment – In case the customers decided to do the purchase despite the registration problems, your business can suffer a major loss if you offer only one type of payment. That is if you accept only Paypal or only credit cards. Not all people use Paypal and there’s still a somewhat tainted view on direct credit card payments online.
You have to understand that these are not the only ways to pay online and consider proposing other options, like Google Wallet or Dwolla. The more the merrier.
Long and unclear checkouts – Again, the checkouts that take too long to process, or the ones that toss and turn the user from one page to another lower the trust you previously earned. When you omit the three unnecessary pages from the checkout system, people will feel safer and they will gladly come back again.
Management time
Another headache that’s causing eCommerce businesses to fall short is the management time. Marketers who own multiple stores often experience this particular problem. When you manage multiple stores at once, it can take over the majority of your time.
The problems you’ll most likely face are:
Managing orders separately – Every order is unique and should be treated that way. But owning multiple webstores is making your job far worse. Not only you have to be careful with the orders, but also you have watch out for the return processing.
Inventory updates – Your inventory can run out of best-selling product at a certain time of the year. Make sure to be consistent in tracking how many items are left in your inventory with the help of real-time inventory updates.
The solution to separate orders and slow inventory updates is to centralize all of your data. You can do that by using a management platform, such as nChannel.
Costs
The last battle in a war with global competition is minimizing the costs. Website management can, other than time, cost you a lot of money. Hence smaller businesses don’t even try making their own website.
With that said, the marketers usually turn to third-party sites like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon because their own website is too expensive to run. Also, the trust factor and visibility significantly increase when moving to a bigger website, but the competition is much stronger.
Nonetheless, you can get a simple fix for a fraction of the cost of running a website. Shopify offers eCommerce solutions for online sellers for a monthly fee. Once you set up an eCommerce site, they will help you managing purchases, reviews, and security.
All-in-One Solution to Beat the Global Competition
Getting acquainted with the biggest problems you can face and trying to solve them is the first step of the way. You may get to a point where you’ve used all your options but your business still seems to be a small fish in the eCommerce tank.
The perfect alternative to easily selling and buying online is payever, where you can manage your store from one location. Payever lets you integrate multiple shop systems for an improved user experience. You can turn your Facebook page into a store and make purchasing as accessible as ever.
Conclusion
Beating the global competition has never been easier with all of the tools available at little to no cost. Your business has to gradually iron out the communication issues, low conversion rates, and shopping cart abandonment problems and it’s ready to bloom.
However, competing against other online marketers has also never been as hard. Your final goal is to make sure you deliver your potential customers a unique user experience to stand out from the crowd.
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