The World Wide Web helps entrepreneurs to reach out to their potential customers 24/7 through out the year. It is essential for entrepreneurs to grow their business with careful planning. There are many e-commerce businesses which fall flat because they do not come up with proper planning and strategies. Many e-commerce entrepreneurs make some common mistakes which hamper the growth of their business. Depending on the gravity of the mistakes committed by entrepreneurs, businesses will suffer. Let us check out some severe mistakes which entrepreneurs do with their e-commerce portal.
1)Resorting to Poor Payment Gateways
Good payment gateways help entrepreneurs to make payments quickly and easily. They keep money and other private details of customers safe. With secure gateways, entrepreneurs can win the trust of their customers and in consequence, the customers feel secure while making purchases. Many gateways are capable of detecting fraud. Therefore, entrepreneurs must take the help of very good gateways rather than settling for poor gateways. Poor gateways may not contribute much to the progress of businesses. Entrepreneurs must use secure and verified gateways to make their customers feel comfortable.
Entrepreneurs must select a professional payment gateway provider before launching an e-commerce portal. An entrepreneur will have to search for long in order to choose a gateway which will be perfect to his brand. Some payment gateways can be expensive. An entrepreneur can look at payment gateway providers in two ways. First, he can select a payment gateway provider which has zero setup fees but high transaction rate. Second, he can opt for a provider which has slightly high setup fees but very low transaction rate. When one has hundreds of daily transactions, it is pointless to select a provider which has transaction fees of 4%. Business men should think of investing less and gaining more profit in terms of business.
2)Following things blindly
An e- commerce portal can be set up in a few hours. But to create a successful e-commerce portal one has to have proper planning and it consumes considerable time too. While launching an e-commerce portal entrepreneurs get busy with the web design, product database or stock. Then they may not be able to focus on payment gateways. They just settle for some payment gateway recommended by their online developers. Entrepreneurs ignore the payment mode in the hurry of setting up an e-commerce portal. This mistake will, later, have its consequences on their business.
3)Neglecting the user interface
E-commerce portals should not neglect user-support systems like online help and self-explanatory user interface. Entrepreneurs need to tailor their user-support features to the target customer base. A well-designed e-commerce portal user interface immensely contributes to the way users accept the system. Most of the e-commerce websites consist of static web pages. If user interfaces are neglected there will be a crunch in the users and the system will be less known.
4)Highlight USP
USP offers information about the services and products of the entrepreneur. Such information does not change often, and the quantity of terms is usually small in such cases. E-commerce sites generally ignore user interface and customer experience. These should not be ignored for a better business of e-commerce sites. Information about the services and products should reach as many people as possible in order to have a brisk business.
5)Ignoring the conversion rates
This is a major mistake entrepreneurs do in e-commerce portals. Conversion rates are highly essential to comprehend the success and failure of e-commerce businesses. It seems attractive to draw huge traffic towards e-commerce websites. But the real essence lies in converting the traffic into customers or sales leads. Increasing the conversion rate is the capability of the portal. Depending on the power of the portal an entrepreneur will have potential clients and sales. If a business owner ignores conversion rates, the e-commerce business will go on a downward motion. Designing a portal is not a big deal, but ensuring a fast transaction process requires some skills and business strategies. A faster transaction process leads to higher user engagement and increased conversion rate. Having a FAQ section is also a great idea to tell customers about shipping, pricing and return policies.
6)Neglecting the SEO point of view
It is really unfortunate that many entrepreneurs dealing with e-commerce businesses often tend to forget about the SEO point of view of business. There are spam activities and negative optimization involved in SEO businesses. But a business owner needs to develop the skills of segregating and understanding what is spurious and what is genuine. Entrepreneurs must focus on long tail traffic rather than focusing on head term traffic. Long tail traffic results in better conversion rates. Both on-site and search engine referrals can be monitored by SEO practices. Business men need to know what customers are looking for the most and accordingly they can mould their business deals. Entrepreneurs are required to set up their e-commerce portals after thorough planning. Great attention must be paid to the simplicity, security and speed of the business functions which will ensure better user experience in the subsequent period. Therefore, the first and foremost point every entrepreneur must keep in mind is that they must stay clear of the mistakes they could possibly commit. Enough awareness and a good presence of mind will definitely improve the e-commerce portals and their conversion rates.
7)Entrepreneurs must convey everything in head to developer
Entrepreneurs must engage with their customers. Business owners should instruct their web developers to design their website in a simple way which will be understood by all customers in a straightforward fashion. Customers are not willing to spend a lot of time on web trying to do various tasks. Instead, the procedures should be made as simple as possible. Customers should feel that the tasks are valuable to them. Then only they will explore more and use systems. Any businessman will suffer huge losses if he ignores the users’ experience. The website architecture and planning should be simple, at the same time the system could be complicated. Business men must invest in user experience-oriented design and on web applications which are rich in interaction.
Joseph Porter is a freelance writer at Case Analysis/Review writing service and the professionals helps for getting best dissertations for the academic students with over 14 year’s experience. He enjoys writing about current trends and innovations in education, technology and travelling.
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