Virtual space is decently “built up” by online stores of various kinds and sizes. Their attractiveness for offline sellers and startups is explained by two main advantages – the simplicity of creating an online platform and large coverage of the target audience. However, 60-90% of online stores are closed during the first year of operation. This percentage could be much lower if business owners did not make the following mistakes when opening online stores.
Marketing, positioning and business plan
Sales problems with 90% of new Internet entrepreneurs are not their personal business qualities, but the fact that they have not conducted market research market, target audience (TA) and competitors. Therefore, they do not understand to whom they offer a product or service, do not know the real needs of the audience and do not know how to sell effectively in the selected niche.
Unprocessed business plan
In preparing a business plan, the effectiveness of investments in the online store is assessed according to marketing analysis. It also determines the profitability of the niche, the product group for sale on the Internet, sales channels, payment methods and delivery of orders.
“Due to an unrealistic plan for the development of the online store, there are various tricks with the expected profit in the style of” low margin – low turnover “or” high margin – no sales. In the first option, all revenue goes to keep the project afloat. The store is dead rather than alive. In the second option, high margin goods do not find demand among buyers”.
Tech errors at the creation of online store
Unfortunate mistakes are also made at the stage of developing the structure and design of the store. There are many Internet boutiques with overloaded “showcases”. Due to the abundance of graphic information and/or advertising banners focus on the main thing is confused, the attention of the visitor dissipates, and the potential customer goes to competitors. Also, the situation with the structure of the site, usability.
Difficult design
The overloaded or too minimalistic design causes negative associations among visitors, and with such emotions, they are unlikely to make a purchase.
Registration of Internet shop should carry out simultaneously both aesthetic, and practical functions. The detailed study of its structure begins at the stage of prototyping when the framework of the future site is created without design. Only after the prototype is agreed with the customer, it is transferred to the designer”.
One channel of communication with clients
For contact with the administration and managers, there is one or two ways of communication: telephone and/or e-mail. It is unlikely that such a shop will wait for high response and customer loyalty.
Bad usability
Usability – is the convenience and ease of use of the resource. If a user in an online store does not understand how to choose a product, where to place an order and delivery (shipping suite by mageworx would be helpful), what fields to fill in and so on, he will not solve the “rebus”, but just choose another store. Check yours with these “golden rules”:
3-Click Rule – the visitor must get from the main page of the site to the information he needs in a maximum of 3 clicks. Endless series of internal pages will scare away any buyer.
Rule 7 – a person can comfortably perceive 5-7 objects, so you do not need to place on the navigation bar on the site more than 7 points.
Rule 2-second – the longer a visitor expects a response from the resource, the more likely it is that he will close the web page. The optimal period of time for the user to wait for the download of the site section – 2-3 seconds.
The rule of the inverted pyramid – description of goods, articles, reviews should begin with the most useful information for the visitor to the site, confirmed by important data and end with less important material.
If you think carefully about where these errors occur when creating online stores, it becomes clear: all their diversity is reduced to 2 reasons. The first is ignorance of what to do and how to do it, the second is laziness in all this. The second makes you ask a logical question: why do you even need an online store? This is a full work, which requires time, effort and resources. Success is possible if you are ready to learn and teach your team, ready to invest in development. This is the law of any business. But for those who want to eliminate the first, we write materials such as this and hope that our advice will help solve seemingly insoluble problems. Anyway, good luck!
