More than half of startups fail, and Amazon is responsible for more than 40 percent of sales made online.
To be successful in the competitive ecommerce industry, you need to avoid the mistakes that will cause many of your competitors to fail.
Mistakes are learning opportunities. There’s no doubt about that. It is better not to make a mistake in the first place.
There are 13 mistakes that new ecommerce sites should avoid making.
1. Reinventing the Wheel
A new ecommerce brand tends to fall into one of two traps:
- Slapping something entirely derivative together.
- Attempting to build a unique solution for everything.
Don’t develop custom solutions to problems you face unless it directly impacts your branding and ability to offer a unique selling proposition.
If you want to create an online store, you should use an existing ecommerce platform such as Shopify or Magento, unless your brand’s selling point is a unique platform.
I’m warning you now, most customers want a familiar shopping experience with a design and navigation that they’re already familiar with.
This applies to your shopping carts, your shipping fulfillment, and virtually every other part of your business. Don’t try to sell something that’s not your specialty. Let someone else who is better at it handle it.
Don’t worry about what makes you similar to other brands, focus on what makes you different.
2. Untrustworthy Design
The Northumbria University researchers found that the design of a site is more important to users than any of the site’s content in determining whether the site is trustworthy.
Unless you are a highly qualified designer, you should not try to design this area yourself.
The most successful ecommerce brands use platforms that are trusted and have been tested, as well as having an up-to-date and modern theme. If design is not a key factor that makes your brand stand out from the competition, then following this advice is a good idea. If design is important to your brand, make sure to invest in talented designers and don’t skimp on quality.
3. Redundant Product Descriptions
One of the most common SEO issues with new ecommerce sites is that the product descriptions are often too similar to each other.
You won’t get much search engine traffic on your product pages if your descriptions are just copies of what the manufacturer has.
Google will see these product pages as copies of other pages that exist, and your results will not be displayed on the first page.
Many product descriptions make no attempt to address potential customer concerns, miss opportunities to appeal to the customer’s needs, or fail to show comparisons that would convince the customer to buy from your site over a competitor.
Product descriptions are very important, and you should never neglect them. If your inventory list is large, focus on your highest selling or most promising products.
4. Not Being Profitable (No, Really)
I know this idea might sound ridiculous, but it’s actually really common for new ecommerce sites to have business models that can never be profitable.
You need to think about how things will change as you get bigger, and do the math to figure out what will happen. If your business isn’t currently profitable and your costs increase along with production, you will lose money if sales suddenly rise.
It is more important to focus on making a profit when first starting a business than to try to grow the business quickly. You should prioritize profitability over trying to increase the size of the business while you are still working out any problems with the business.
5. No Responsive Design
Websites that are not responsive are less common than they used to be, but I still see them occasionally. Your site needs to be responsive so that it can be viewed on any device.
A majority of adults now purchase items using their smartphones, and this number is steadily increasing. 21 percent of all online spending is now done through mobile devices.
One of the advantages of using a widely tested theme is that it requires only minor customizations, unless your brand is distinguished by its unique design. To make sure your theme will work well on mobile devices, use Google’s mobile-friendly test. To test how well it will work on different devices, try it out on as many devices as possible.
It is extremely important to place a test order from a mobile device. A shopping cart that looks fine on mobile but fails to submit an order is all too common.
6. No Target Audience
If you want to be successful in ecommerce, you need to choose a specific target audience and gain their trust.
The most important part of this is creating a customer profile, which is a portrait of your ideal customer and the circumstances that will lead them to you. This includes:
- An understanding of their interests.
- Any subcultures they may be a part of.
- Values that are important to them.
- Needs that your product solves for them.
- Places where they “hang out.”
There is no one right way to do this, but the most effective approach combines data analysis with intuition, and includes talking to people who are familiar with the topic. The more focused you are, the better you will be able to connect with others.
7. Technical SEO Errors
Ecommerce sites, particularly marketplaces, are more likely to have SEO errors than any other type of site. If your ecommerce business has search engine traffic, it will most likely be successful. However, if there are errors on the website, this could reduce traffic and have a negative impact on the business.
Here are a few of the most common issues to watch out for:
- Duplicate versions of the same page, usually caused by URL variables (those things in your URL that follow a question mark). Resolve these with canonicalization.
- Links to pages that don’t exist (that are 404). Use a crawl tool like Screaming Frog to find these.
- Similarly, links to redirected pages (that are 301 or 302). While clicking on a redirected link will still take the user somewhere, hopefully to a page that still matches what they are looking for, redirects diminish Google PageRank, which is an important factor in determining where your site will turn up in search results. You can use a crawl tool to find these as well. These should be replaced with links to the final page.
- Pages that can’t be reached from any links on your site. You will need to adjust your theme to ensure that all pages are reachable from the navigation. You can find out if this is a problem by comparing your page database with your crawl. If any pages aren’t found during the crawl, they aren’t getting linked to.
Working with a professional for your technical SEO is recommended if it is within your budget. Technical SEO is a huge discipline, and a professional can help you make the most of your budget.
8. Lack Of Sitemaps And Robots.Txt
Sitemaps and robots.txt are essential for crawling on your site. You need a sitemap that automatically updates itself whenever there are changes to your products or pages.
This makes sure that your new products, categories, and content get indexed efficiently and that it is found in the most opportune path.
Most ecommerce CMSs offer automated sitemaps or plugins for automated sitemaps. It is important to have a system in place for your clients. Crawlers have a lot of difficulty when products and categories are moved around, new products are added, and old products are removed.
It is important to have an up-to-date sitemap.xml file so that Google and other search engines can easily find and crawl your website.
9. Lack Of A Blog And Content-Driven Internal Linking
Your content strategy for your blog should include a mix of posts highlighting your products, buyer’s guides, posts on how to take care of your products, and links to those posts from your product and category pages.
If you want to improve your organic search volume, featuring products in your posts is a great way to do it. What can’t you get in with your product description? Use that as a blog post. Use anything that you consider to be of value as a blog post, and make sure to keep up with the publishing schedule.
The more pages, and the more posts, the better.
You can increase your website’s traffic by creating buyer guides and evergreen content that is based around your products. This type of content will be useful for even those who do not purchase your products. Be sure to have a content strategy that includes the topics you want to cover in your posts. Having a content calendar will help you keep track of when to post about these topics.
Product upkeep posts are a perfect example of this. Guides for how to get the most out of your products can be useful to anyone who searches.
If you want to feature your product on the site, you can add a linked image or a “Buy Now” product hover.
Add links from your product pages and categories to related posts. This will help improve your website’s internal linking and can also help increase your organic traffic. This can give users a lot of information about your products to help them make a decision before they purchase. It can help give information where your reviews may be deficient.
Typically, users who read a blog post about a product are 50% more likely to buy that product. Make the most of that opportunity and write about all of your products. Throw them into your content calendar and get writing.
10. Lack Of Schema Markup
Google has adopted a collection of HTML tags called Schema.org to improve the display of their search engine results page (SERP). This tool helps product page information to be better represented within the search engines.
Schema is a set of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way your page is represented in SERPs. Schema markup allows you to include product reviews, star guides, and other trust indicators on your website.
By providing this information, you create a certain level of trust with the consumer, which increases click-through rates and reduces the number of questions they will have once they reach your page.
11. Lack Of Content-Heavy Category Pages
Category pages can be a great place to put guides, links, and other information that can help with the buying process.
This is a common mistake, as categories are a prime hub for content. They are the perfect place to put product guides, buying guides, related blog posts, and more.
Guide your users to buy with information. To increase the likelihood of a sale, provide the customer with information that is convincing. Do not waste their time, but give them the information they want.
12. Lack Of Persona-Driven Buying Pages
You can increase sales by understanding your users’ needs and creating targeted messages for each buying persona. Informed consent will increase the likelihood of users completing a purchase.
Google wants to show you information that is related to you and your location.
If that is the situation, they will definitely reveal to your users the information that is most relevant to them. You will improve your ranking in the long term if you do.
An example of a persona is someone who would be interested in buying minimalist running shoes. This persona would likely be interested in a shoe that is comfortable and light, and that would not have a lot of extra features. People who are interested in changing from regular to minimalist running shoes may be wondering about the benefits or differences between the two types of shoes.
It’s possible that they’re not familiar with the best minimalist running shoes or the story behind them, since they’re accustomed to regular running shoes.
Give your readers an overview of the key points they should be looking for when they are 80% through the buying process.
You could:
- Represent a “category” type page based on minimalist running shoes,
- Show a video of the difference between minimalist running shoes compared to traditional running shoes.
- Put up links to the most popular brands of minimalist running shoes based on sales,
- Give the key points to look for (e.g. rise and drop of the shoe, weight of the shoe, trail or road shoe).
- Create related blog posts such as the benefits of minimalist running shoes.
- Represent 3 of the top best-seller running shoes on the page.
13. Lack Of A Strong, Dynamic CMS
A good ecommerce CMS will make your store much easier to use, and much more enjoyable overall.
One of the top ecommerce CMSs is Shopify. It takes care of all the SEO work for you so you can focus on your content and products.
It also has a very broad category of themes and plugins like WordPress does, but with a much more user-friendly interface that has an integrated analytics dashboard. This allows you to see how your site is performing at a glance.
Some other resources that might help you further test your digital strategy include:
- A great article focusing on the general content issues of e-commerce sites. Drilling down on individual product descriptions etc.
- “7 Critical SEO errors of E-commerce Websites” by Neil Patel
- An article focusing on the necessities of an SEO-friendly ecommerce platform. Many features to look for and things to consider whilst choosing what CMS to run your shop on.
- Moz’s “Choosing an SEO Friendly Ecommerce Platform: 20 Features to Look For” by Spencer Yao
- A few interesting common issues with ecommerce sites. A little less granular than the rest, but still a good read.
- Webfx’s “4 Common Ecommerce SEO Problems (& How to Fix Them)” by Abby Fields
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