Common Mistakes Hurting Your Website Right Now

Since e-commerce is such a large market, there is obviously a lot of competition. Online stores currently number anywhere between 12 and 24 million, and those numbers are continuously increasing. By 2023, e-commerce is expected to generate more than $6.5 trillion in sales, or 22% of all retail sales.

However, you must give customers several reasons if you want to turn visitors to your internet store into buyers. The layout of the website itself is one of the most frequent causes of visitors leaving your online business, which lowers your conversion rate. For instance, 48% of consumers rank website design as the most important consideration for determining a company's credibility.

With that in mind, we have put together a list of some of the top mistakes your site might be making right now that are harming your conversions and online sales. E Commerce is an unpredictable and frantic industry but there are certain steps you should be taking in order to maximise your site and product potential. These vary from website fixes to being more open and honest with your copy.

1. Confusing Navigation

You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your visitors, and after you do, you need to make their time on your website as seamless as possible. This also applies to shopping within your online store. Visitors will probably become frustrated and leave if they can't discover the item they want to buy or if they have to navigate through several screens to get to it. Navigation should be as easy to use as feasible when your online store merely has one or a small number of products.

To improve your navigation, make use of categories and collections and make sure key items are easily found on the main navigation bar. If you are running a sale, have the sale items easily to navigate to so your customers don’t have to spend them identifying what is actually in the sale. If you offer products for different genders, make sure these are easily accessible. A common error with clothing brands is that mens or womens items are not easily searchable.

If you want to include a search bar, make sure it actually works and does what you want it to. There’s nothing more frustrating than searching for trainers and ending up with a bunch of random vaguely related items such as socks or sandals.

2. Unclear Shipping Details

Free shipping is something that almost every consumer enjoys more than anything else, but even if you are unable to provide it, you may still make a sale by being honest about it. All the additional fees, including shipping, taxes, or any other kind of additional charge, are one of the most frequent causes of shopping cart abandonment, largely because the buyers aren't made aware of them until the very end of the checkout process. In fact, this is the reason that 49% of consumers leave items in their shopping carts. You can actually check this yourself with a bit of research into your abandoned cart data. If your users are frequently abandoning their carts, it’s likely that unclear or non-existent postage information is at least partially to blame.

To improve this, simply be up front about any charges. This will be unlikely to stop every abandoned cart but it’ll improve your conversion rates and help retain some of those near misses.

3. Not Maximizing the Value of User Reviews

Once you have social proof, you should capitalise on it by fusing user feedback with user-generated content, which will give your business more credibility. This is especially true if a review includes photos of your product that were taken by a consumer while they were actually using it. Giving clients the option to contribute photographs not only boosts trust but also gives your company an air of openness and transparency. Some goods simply have to be seen in a specific setting in order for potential buyers to understand what they are like.

4. Complex Checkout Process

The checkout procedure is a significant factor in why customers might be abandoning your online store and their shopping carts. They may become impatient because it takes too long or because they are unable to use a guest account to make purchases. Offering users a guest account may reduce your ability to retarget and engage with them but if it improves your sales, it is a worthwhile sacrifice especially if your brand doesn’t do much retargeting.

In fact, 35% of customers admitted to leaving an item in their cart without using the guest checkout option. Additionally, if consumers haven't yet developed trust in your company, they might be reluctant to divulge their personal information.

5. Not Optimizing Your Site For Speed

Having a website that looks fantastic but loads slowly is one major error that many e-commerce companies make. This is particularly true for brands that have a lot of image-based content. You can have all the pretty pictures in the world but if your users don’t see them, they are worthless. Statistics show that if a website loads more slowly than four seconds, a business loses about 25% of its online traffic. Walmart also discovered that for every one-second increase in page load time, its conversion rate increased by 2%.

Unfortunately, consumers of today are notoriously impatient, and that extra second it takes for your website to load might make the difference between a conversion and a visitor leaving to see one of your rivals.

Poor page performance affects not only your conversion rate but also the UX, bounce rate, and ranking of your website. Now that there are numerous variables that can impact page speed, you might want to thoroughly examine every component that could have an impact on how well your website performs. As was already said, image-based information might slow down your download speed. This is typically because high definition, huge files require a long time to download and load. There are several tools you may use to compress your photographs and reduce file sizes without drastically sacrificing quality.

Although having a great website is crucial, functionality should never be sacrificed for beauty. With all the useful advice in this article, you should be able to avoid having to pick between the two and avoid some of the most typical errors that e-commerce business owners make. Best of luck!