When you first launched your ecommerce business, you might have felt full of excitement for launching your product, growing brand recognition, and generating a large return on your investment. However, if you are struggling to secure many customers or earn a huge profit, you might feel disheartened by the venture and question if you have what it takes to grow the business.
Unfortunately, the ecommerce industry has a failure rate of 90% in the first 120 days, but your company doesn’t need to fall into this statistic. Here are three reasons your online store is failing and the potential solutions.
1. You Have a Poor-Quality Website
If you owned a brick-and-mortar store, you would expect customers to walk out the door if it was poorly laid out, messy, and had slow service. Therefore, you should expect the same reaction if your site is slow to load, confusing, and outdated. Customers will struggle to trust your business and products if it has bad usability, a lack of product descriptions, low-quality photographs, and an unattractive design.
The Solution: If you’re serious about gaining new customers and making a success of your ecommerce business, you must create a simple, functional, and attractive website. Remove all unnecessary elements, add searchable product categories, improve content and images, increase your site speed, and create a responsive, professional design.
2. Your Target Audient Can’t Find You
If traffic is slow, your revenue is poor, and your site is struggling to appear in the search engine result pages, you need to adopt a stronger SEO strategy. Once you have transformed the user experience, focus your attention on increasing your ecommerce business’s presence in the search engines; otherwise, you’ll struggle to attract customers to your website and enjoy a big return on investment.
The Solution: If you have next to no online marketing experience, read Stryde’s guide to SEO. It provides a rundown of the actions you need to take to grow your ecommerce store’s presence in the likes of Google, including tips for performing keyword research, building backlinks, and optimizing your website for the search engines. It could improve your ranking for various powerful keywords and phrases, which will help your target audience find you online and place an order.
3. Your Visitors Don’t Trust Your Business
Building trust is one of the hardest challenges a business will face. If your target demographic doesn’t have faith in your brand or doubts the quality of your products and services, they are less likely to place an order.
The Solution: Encourage customers to buy from your business by proving you run a trustworthy ecommerce website.
For example, you can convey professionalism by:
- Investing in an SSL certificate
- Building a high-quality, easy-to-use website
- Displaying various industry badges
- Incorporating backlinks to active social media pages
- Writing interesting, well-written content and product descriptions
- Featuring customer testimonials
Growing a successful ecommerce business can take time, perseverance, and investment. After following the above tips, you could soon enjoy a larger customer base, greater brand awareness, and a bigger profit margin.
