You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
If you were to open a coffee shop inside a popular shopping mall, would you throw open the door to the customers without installing furniture?
You wouldn’t, right? In fact, nobody would.
But strangely, when it comes to online business, you would be surprised to see how many e-commerce businesses launch their website when they are barely ready for customers.
Here’s something you must remember before going live with your online shop – a poorly designed website can affect your inbound campaign outcome, and conversion negatively.
So, let’s take a look at five such business-critical blunders many e-commerce businesses commit but you should NOT.
Duplicate or No Product Descriptions
E-commerce businesses are notorious for having little to no product information on their website. This can badly hurt their conversion rate.
Many others simply copy and paste product info from manufacturers website to save time. This is not a good idea as it may lead to duplicate content issues and affect your site’s performance in the search engines. Worse, your site may qualify for a Google Panda penalty.
Writing informative and original descriptions for your products will help your search engine optimization efforts and improve conversion as well.
Non-Responsive Website
If you are an old e-commerce website and haven’t redesigned your website since your inception, odds are your existing website is not compatible with the smartphones and tablet devices.
Many of your potential customers spend more time searching for your products/services via mobile or tablet devices and if you don’t have a responsive website, it might create a awful user experience and lead to unhappy shopping experience. Worse, they may leave your website and transact with your competitors.
I know you would never want this to happen to your business. So you need to start looking for a developer who can redesign your website or at least make it mobile-responsive.
If you want any help with this, we can help you.
Lousy Customer Support
No matter how user-friendly you may think your website is, odds are your visitors may still get lost in myriad pages, links, categories and products items on your website.
Even if you have a comprehensive FAQ page or clear-cut refund policy, the potential visitors may have some queries that you need to address immediately in order to help them make a decision critical to making a purchase. And, trust me; this very factor becomes decisive from the customer standpoint.
If you don’t have a live chat option on your website, you might fail at capitalizing the potential customers seating on the fence.
Poor Design
When it comes to online shopping, a user-friendly design can positively impact conversion rates. Technically, design can include a wide range of factors such as responsive theme, breadcrumbs, clean navigation, high quality images and even fonts.
Designed poorly, your website can turn off your visitors and force them out. It would also affect their trust on your website. It is believed Google also takes design as a ranking factor. Therefore, you must consider improving your design from time to time.
Buggy Payment Gateway
Sometimes your payment gateway may act up and you will not have any clue about it.
Recently one of my clients discovered a sudden increase in the number of cart abandonment at his site. Upon inspection, we found that his customers were not able to make payment using credit cards and hence abandon their cards and leave the site in frustration. Although the client was able to fix the bug, he lost many sales.
Conducting a weekly site audit can help you find out the potential bugs in your website and payment gateway.
Hope these tips will help you figure out what’s plaguing your website and address the issues to improve the experience of your site visitors.
