Welcome, Guest ( Customer Panel | Login )
1.    Poor product information
The sole purpose of your ecommerce website is to sell your products so it’s important you make it as simple as possible for visitors to your website to understand what you sell.

Your homepage should contain a clear message and visitors should know what is on offer within seconds of landing on your website, they shouldn’t have to dig around.

Secondly, your product descriptions need to contain all the information that a customer needs to know before they make the decision to purchase. If you sell furniture and don’t’ have the measurements in the product descriptions, how will the customer now whether or not the product is going to fit in their lounge? They won’t, and they’ll simply leave your website and go to your competitors.

2.    Low quality product images

One of the main reasons people prefer to shop in physical stores rather than online is because in a real store they can physically pick up and examine the products. As you cannot not offer this luxury with an ecommerce store, having high quality product images goes a long way to persuading people to buy your products.

Taking professional looking photos of your products doesn’t have to break the bank and it is well worth taking the time an effort of doing it properly.

3.    Annoying / slow checkout

The checkout is arguably the most important part of the online shopping process, it is after all where your vistors turn into buyers.

If yuour checkout process is slow, required too many details or produces unexpected surprises such as hidden shipping fees, your customers only need to click that little ‘x’ at the top of their browser and you’ve lost them.

The VP-ASP One Page Checkout module streamlines the checkout process making it simple for your customers to purchase from your online store.

4.    Lack of payment options
With online fraud more common than ever, people are very selective about where they enter their credit card details, unless you are a big name brand, a lot of people may not trust your store so it’s important that you offer alternative payment options such as PayPal.

Some ecommerce store owners have reported a 20% increase in sales by adding PayPal as a payment option alongside regular credit / debit card payments.

5.    No customer service
You might think that you have the simplest, most informative website out there but there will always be customers who have questions about your products, service, shipping & returns etc.

At the very least you should have a contact form which customers can use to ask questions, but ideally you would also have a telephone number and / or Live Chat facility so customers can get answers instantly.

It is highly recommended that you offer telephone support during the first few months of opening your online store as you will learn a lot about your customers wants and needs, and you can enter any commonly asked questions into an ‘FAQ’ section on your website which should reduce the amount of future calls.

If you don’t offer any form of customer service and your customers are not 100% certain about something, they are highly unlikely to buy from you.


Happy Selling!

Gareth S
VPASP Shopping Cart


addthis

Comments

Great points, especially #1 (Friday, August 22, 2014 00:00)
Great points Gareth, especially point #1. Too many retailers choose to use manufacturer stock descriptions, which does nothing to differentiate them from their competitors. Putting in the time to write unique descriptions or have product videos would go a long way...On a side note, I recently wrote a similar article about common mistakes eCommerce merchants make, which may add to this: http://www.ecommercewarriors.net/8-ecommerce-business-mistakes-to-avoid/

Jeff - Florida
Leave a comment
*Please enter the code shown into the box below

0 Item(s)
$0.00