9 Silly E-Commerce Mistakes Made By Startups

E-commerce industry has emerged as one of the most lucrative industries in the past few years which is all set to cross the $27 trillion sales benchmark by the end of 2020. Every year more and more entrepreneurs launch their startup e-commerce business with big dreams to create success stories in this high-paying industry. In the past decade, the maximum startups were added to the already saturated e-commerce industry of more than 12-24 million e-commerce websites. Unfortunately, out of this big number, only 650,000 websites manage to generate annual sales greater than $1,000; with a majority of the e-commerce startups not even making it up till here. This called for some serious brainstorming about the reason why most of the startups do not achieve success in their e-commerce venture.

The reason is simple; most of the startups invest all their resources in following the latest e-commerce trends in the hope to see big bucks flowing in. However, while religiously following these trends, the entrepreneurs overlook the numerous smaller and sillier mistakes that are capable of overpowering all their e-commerce efforts and holding back their success. Enlisted below are 9 mistakes that e-commerce startups make that can be deadly for their e-commerce business.

Non-Intuitive User Interface

Not offering an intuitive user interface makes navigating on an e-commerce site rough. While designing any e-commerce site, the entrepreneur should keep it in mind the ground rule for an intuitive user interface that the buyer should be able to reach anywhere on the site in just 3 simple clicks. Being a startup, you should know how important it is to keep the buyer engaged on your site, a user interface without an alert box, image carousel, progress bars, breadcrumb navigation, quick-to-load pages, dialog box and effective image CTAs would make the user confused and turn to some other site.

Ineffective Or No Use Of Social Media

Social media is deemed as one of the best platforms to gain organic traffic for any budding e-commerce site. 56% online buyers use social media to know more about any product and if your product is unavailable on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, chances are high that the consumer may turn away from your e-commerce site.

Not Prioritizing The Mobile Users

59% of all e-commerce sessions take place on mobile devices, confirmed a report by Wolfgang Digital . At a time when more than 50% of the buyers are turning to the mobile device for online purchase, not prioritizing this sizeable populace would drag down your leads and success. An e-commerce site without a flawlessly responsive web design for smooth switching will kill the user's interest while making a purchase using the handy device.

Overlooking The Security

In e-commerce, everything hinges on trust, if they don't trust you, they wont buy from you,says digital marketing expert Jeremy Said. And for startups, building trust holds the utmost importance. If the security of your e-commerce site can be easily breached by hackers, no one would trust your startup. A security breach or data hacking can cause irreparable damage to your startup's reputation.

Low-Quality Images

Trying to make a sale of products on e-commerce site with a low-quality image is another mistake most of the startups make. Nearly 78% online shoppers desire to see more images with as much detailed information about the product as possible before making any purchase. If the images on your e-commerce site are not HD quality images that can be zoomed to view every detail, it wouldn't be able to satiate the buyer's thirst for information.

Not Collecting Customer Information

Collecting the customer information should hold supreme importance for e-commerce startups. Not collecting their contact information would detain you from creating targeted ad campaigns for effective marketing. Moreover, it is the age of big data and in order to stay in the competition for leading e-commerce sites, you'd have to use the information collected from the day of launch about customer choice and shopping pattern to offer personalized customer experience.

Underestimating Analytics

Data is the most precious thing for e-commerce success. For the newbies, Google Analytics help in measuring the performance of your e-commerce website to know what's effectively working in your favor and what is not. Analytics helps you get an insight on your site's performance by telling about unique views, page views, the number of users, returning visitors, time spent and much more. Underestimating Analytics would mean that you are aiming all your marketing and SEO efforts in the open air without knowing the response they are creating.

No Paid Ads

Depending solely on organic traffic during the launch or initial stage of e-commerce marketing will lead you nowhere as a startup. Paid ads like Google AdWord allow your ads to appear on the first page of Google results, thus gaining attention from users. No one knows about your startup in the beginning, but using paid ads is proven to bring high-quality traffic on the site immediately; therefore speeding up the first sale.

Lengthy And Confusing Checkout

Most of the startups, in the quest to make their site more secure, ask too much from the online buyer at the time of checkout. This makes the checkout lengthy and confusing for the consumer. The consumer wants to have a smooth checkout process to place order for their product from the shopping cart. In addition to that, not providing guest user checkout and limiting purchase to registered users can make the consumer leave the semi-loaded shopping cart as it is.

These were some of the major mistakes that most of the startups make unknowingly while establishing their e-commerce business. If you have also made any such mistake in your recently launched e-commerce site, then correct them now to generate more leads and increase your product sales within a short span of time.