Given the explosion of mobile devices and online sales in past several years, you might be tempted to believe you are witnessing the end of brick and wall stores. The overall convenience, the simplicity and the time saved are three key elements that deem online selling such a profitable business. Well, at least these perks exist in theory because, as a customer you will notice all sort of blunders and barriers when trying to make an online purchase.
In the eventuality that you have invested a lot time and cash into your ecommerce site and the sales are low irrespective of your best intentions and efforts, chances are you are making one of the following mistakes. Here’s where I will point them out in order to get you right back on track, folks!
Error pages
While most internet users have grown accustomed to the HTTP 404, such an error is just bad business for an ecommerce site administrator. Incredible as it may sound, the “page not found” error is still very common on retailer and ecommerce sites in general. However, the good news is that you can easily verify is this is an issue on your site by checking out the analytics.
Pages that don’t load
Similar to the notorious 404 error, the pages that take forever to load are a real turn off for your customers. Online purchasing is all about a fast and smooth experience so this is precisely what users expect from you. The negative part here is that not only do your clients have no intention to wait, but chances are search engines will also penalize you for this issue and reduce your visibility in the online environment.
Non-compatible mobile sites
Even though many online retailers have jumped on the bandwagon and have optimized versions of their websites for a wide variety of mobile devices, you may be surprised how many of these mobile sites are not functional. Considering that the mobile commerce in 2012 almost hit $25 billions, which is actually 81% more than 2011, the link between low sales and an erroneous mobile site is self-explanatory.
Captchas
In all honesty, there is absolutely no reasonable answer to why you would ask your customers to type in captchas in order to complete a transaction. In addition to this beginner mistake, another surefire method to lose a sale and get a bad reputation online is to integrate captchas for customers who are trying to contact you. While you might be using the captcha to reduce the amount of spam in your email, that’s just acting rude towards your clients!
Concealed buttons
If you decided to design the ecommerce site yourself in an attempt to save some cash or you worked with a web design company that offered “too good to be true” deals, it doesn’t hurt to determine whether or not you have invisible buttons. Concealed buttons in this case refers to the call-to-action buttons that should be visible at all times for a customer browsing your site. And yes, if you have to scroll down the page in order to add a certain item to the shopping cart or checkout, well, that is considered a hidden button.
