The World Wide Web helps you reach out to potential clients around the world who can easily purchase products from your e-commerce portal 24/7 all year long. As an entrepreneur, it is very essential for you to grow your business and increase your profits with meticulous planning and implementation.
For every e-commerce business that is successful, there are dozens that fall flat as they do not come with proper planning and strategies. Many ecommerce entrepreneurs make some common mistakes that hurt their business and stop their growth even before their enterprise begins to take off.
Settling for Poor Payment Gateways
A good payment gateway help you make payments easily and quickly. It keeps the money and private details of your customer safe. A secure gateway also helps you gain the trust of your online customers and they feel secure while making a purchase. Many gateways also offer additional services such as fraud detection and recurring billing which can help your business continue smoothly. It is important to use a payment gateway that is secure and verified and makes your customers feel comfortable.
Don’t Follow Anything Blindly
It takes very little time – often only a few hours – to set up an e-commerce portal. However, creating a successful e-commerce portal takes planning and time. During the launch of an e-commerce portal, most entrepreneurs are found to be too busy with the web design, product database or the stock to attend to things like payment gateway.
They tend to settle for whatever is recommended to them by their online developer. With various essential matters to take care of, entrepreneurs ignore the payment mode although they recognize that it is important. They get overwhelmed to deal with so many providers, packages and rates and they are also unsure about how much business they will be able to do.
Things to do before Selecting Payment Gateway Providers
When you are thinking of setting up an e-commerce portal, it is essential to select a professional payment gateway provider. There are lots of payment gateways available that you can choose from. It can be a time consuming process to pick a gateway that would be perfect for your brand. Payment gateways can be expensive although they have a flat fee rather than charging a commission on sales. PayPal, Trust Commerce and Authorize.net and Charge.com are some of the most reputed and secure payment gateways out there.
- There are two ways of looking at it, first one is, you can select a payment gateway provider which has zero setup fees but high transaction rate and vice versa.
- Find a middle way; there is no point in choosing a provider which has transaction fees of 4%, when you have hundreds of daily transactions. You should opt for a provider which may have a bit high setup fees but very low transaction rate.
Don’t forget to read the reviews of the payment gateway providers. (Recommendation: I will recommend my friend’s website to accept credit card on your website.)
Neglecting the User Interface
User-support features such as online help and self-explanatory user interface should not be neglected in e-commerce portals, which is the case in any software system. As an entrepreneur, it is essential for you to tailor your user-support features to the target customer base of your portal.
A well-designed e-commerce portal user interface contributes enormously to the way users accept the system. Most e-commerce websites usually consist of static web pages.
Highlight your USP
These offer information about the services and products of the merchant. The quantity of items is usually quite small in such cases and range from 2-30 in number. The information about the services and products does not change often, which is not what should be the case. The user interface and customer experience is usually ignore is such websites. This is a common case in portals run by small companies and individual sellers.
Convey everything in your head to developer
For proper engagement with customers, you should instruct your web developers to keep the design of your website simple so that customers can get straightforward information about the products on offer. Customers are found to shun systems which involve multiple tasks that consume much time; the tasks should seem to be valuable to them. As an entrepreneur, you can suffer huge losses if you ignore the user experience. The more complicated the system, the simpler the website architecture and planning should be. Investing in a user experience-oriented design and interaction-rich Web applications can be extremely advantageous for your EC system.
Don’t Ignore the Conversion Rates, Track It.
Conversion rates are vital to understand and analyze the success and failure of an eCommerce business. It seems lucrative to generate more user traffic to a portal but it can be a big failure if the traffic fails to convert into customers or sales leads. It can be difficult to increase the conversion rate – which is a fairly direct reflection of the power of your portal to engage and retain potential clients. Addressing a few things can help enhance your website conversion rate.
Designing a portal with only a few pages can be great! Make sure that the action buttons are usable; implement too tips and a quick and easy checkout process – possibly in a single web page. A faster transaction process can lead to higher user engagement and increased conversion rate.
It can also be beneficial to have a useful FAQ section that clearly tells customers about your shipping, pricing and returns policies. Adding personal live support can further enhance the online experience for users.
Neglecting the SEO Point of View
It is surprising when you consider how entrepreneurs often neglect the SEO dimension of ecommerce sites. Most run-of-the-mill stores are filled with duplicate content and crawler issues. These problems are obviously regarded by search engines as spam practices and negative optimization. It is essential to stay clear of these issues. It is also essential to focus on long tail traffic as they tend to result in better conversions as compared to head term traffic.
The SEO practices also include monitoring the search queries constantly, both on-site and on search engine referrals. This will help you know which products people are looking for the most.
You can then add these items and feature relevant information on your portal.
As an entrepreneur, it is vital for you to set up your EC portal after proper planning and keeping all points in mind. Paying attention to the simplicity, security and speed can improve the complete user experience for your customers. While there could of course be more issues to take care of, staying clear of the above mistakes can definitely improve your e-commerce portal and increase its conversion rate.
I would highly recommend this guide if you are starting your e-commerce portal from scratch
