Ecommerce businesses are making more profits than ever and changing the way that we shop. Although the high street isn’t exactly dead, online shopping is slowly taking over, and there are now more ecommerce sellers fighting for online space than ever before. There are many challenges to tackle when launching a new ecommerce brand, but some of the main issues often have surprisingly simple solutions. Often, simply being aware of an issue is enough to be able to avoid it. If you want some of the market share of the growing ecommerce sector, here are some of the most common issues you can expect to encounter and how to resolve them.
High Bounce Rate
Search engines want your website to be valuable to those that view it, and one of the criteria that they use to judge your website’s value is to measure how long visitors stay on it. If the majority of your website visitors only stay present for a few seconds (because your pages are too slow to load or they see immediately that they aren’t getting the answers they need), then search engines will judge you to be of low value. Having a high bounce rate is lethal for an ecommerce brand, so make sure that your web pages provide value in the form of well-written content, professional images, and an awareness of website speed.
Low Conversion Rates
If you do get people to stay on your website for long enough to fill up a shopping cart, you still might not get to finish a sale. Your conversion rate is simply how many people visit your site and how many of those visits convert into sales. This is an essential balance to optimise as much as possible, but the concept of sales funnels and the customer journey can be tricky to address unless you have specialist training. The best way to tackle this is to use a CRO agency with experience and provable successes. When it’s sales that matter in the ecommerce sector, your conversion rates need to be optimised as much as possible. If your conversion rates are low, it’s a sign that there is something wrong with your ecommerce store.
Cybersecurity and Cyber Defences
Hackers love small businesses because those are the targets that lack the budget to hire teams of cybersecurity specialists. That doesn’t mean that you are never going to be able to protect yourself online. It simply means that you will need to prioritise the best ways to keep your business, your staff, and your customers safe when they are using your website or handing over their personal information. No business is too small to be invisible to cybercriminals, so make sure that you understand some cybersecurity basics such as the need for firewalls and password management systems. Another option to consider is to cyber insurance to reduce mitigate risks of data breach and provide an extra layer of protection.
With so many potential competitors and threats, ecommerce can certainly be a challenge. However, by learning about the most common issues, it becomes much easier to address them quickly and efficiently. If your product pages are so boring that potential customers are immediately bouncing elsewhere, or your lack of conversions is affecting your profit margins, then the more you know, the easier the resolutions will be.
