Sometimes you’re on the right track, and you run into roadblocks that hinder your progress. You need the right tools, expertise, and determination to reach the top, just like a rock climber.

It is critical to prepare yourself for success by avoiding common blunders made by other entrepreneurs on their eCommerce journey.

From selecting the wrong eCommerce platform to failing to consider user experience, this blog will teach you what mistakes to avoid — and how to position yourself for eCommerce success.

Check out these 7 critical eCommerce mistakes to avoid when selling online if you have big plans to grow your eCommerce business.

7 Mistakes That Could Be Hurting Your Online Store

Whether you’re an ecommerce pro or a total newcomer, making these 7 mistakes will hurt your results. Are you guilty of any of these offenses?

1. Lack of a Solid Marketing Strategy

A solid marketing strategy is essential for a successful ecommerce store. People don’t know your products exist if they can’t find them. Unsurprisingly, purchasing from you becomes impossible at that point. It is critical to invest in a multi-pronged marketing strategy incorporating SEO, social media, paid to advertise, and content creation. You will gain more customers, more sales, and more conversions when you do this. The plan is the keyword here; make sure to map out your strategy and progress to stay organized and on top of what’s working and what isn’t.

2. Ignoring Competitors

It goes without saying that if your company is like most others, you have competitors. Furthermore, those competitors are vying for the same business that you are. You must pay attention to what they are doing, how they are doing it, and the extent to which their efforts are successful.

Competitive analysis should be an important part of your launch strategy, but it should also be done regularly. Set up an alert system to notify you whenever your competition publishes a piece, targets a specific keyword, or creates a new product to take a hands-off approach. This allows you to stay ahead of the competition and avoid passing up obvious opportunities. We also recommend following them on social media to see what they’re posting, how they’re engaging, and what approaches they’re taking.

3. Providing Little to No Customer Service

One of the most important aspects of a successful online store is customer service. If you don’t invest in excellent customer service, you can bet your customers will leave sooner than later. According to HelpScout, 78% of customers have abandoned a shopping cart or a transaction due to poor customer service. As if that weren’t enough, customers talk about bad customer service experiences twice as much as they do about good customer service experiences, which means that word of your company’s service flaws could spread quickly. 

Keeping this in mind that customer service is critical to ecommerce growth. To be successful, you must adapt it to your customer’s needs, the growth of your platform, and the suite of products you’ve chosen to offer.

4. Not Developing a Distinctive Voice

To be successful with your online store, you must develop a distinct voice. This distinguishes your online store from competitors and promotes brand recall. Developing a voice also helps make your ecommerce brand more recognizable, allowing customers to identify you in an online environment. Using a distinct tone in your content makes your brand more enjoyable and relatable. It makes people want to share your content with their friends after seeing it on their Newsfeed.

5. Buyer Personas Aren’t Being Created

If you aren’t creating buyer personas, you lose the business you should be claiming. Buyer personas, or fictionalized people who closely resemble your target customers, enable you to target your marketing message and product distribution while also ensuring that the people you’re attempting to reach are paying attention.

If you’ve never created a marketing persona for your brand, now is the time (HubSpot’s guide can help). We recommend developing 2-4 different personas of your likely or desired customers. If your marketing personas are outdated or inaccurate, you should update them. Remember that your buyer personas can evolve, so revise them every few years or even months.

6. Inadequate social proof

Today, 92 percent of consumers read online reviews, and 80 percent trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

This statement should be enough to persuade e-commerce store owners to focus more on reviews as a primary source of social proof. Social proof and customer feedback are becoming essential for any e-commerce company seeking to remain relevant and trustworthy in an ever-changing shopping journey.

7. Providing a Difficult Checkout Process

If you want people to do something as important as giving you money, you must make it as simple as possible for them. This applies equally to your checkout process as it does to everything else. Instead of making customers jump through a dozen hoops to purchase your product, make it quick and easy – people will be more likely to buy and more likely to recommend your site to others if it is quick and easy. Offering a guest checkout option is a great and simple way to enable this. Less work equals a faster transaction.

Bottom line

You want to rise above your rivals and reach the pinnacle of the e-commerce industry. To do so, you must learn from the mistakes of others while keeping your eye on the prize.

You can avoid unexpected costs and time-sucks in your business by knowing the most common pitfalls that other entrepreneurs face in e-commerce.

You will not only ensure that your custom e-commerce website is optimized for success, but you will also achieve happy, loyal customers who are eager to buy your products again and again.