eCommerce, like any business, has its ups and downs. The people who can accept this are typically the ones who succeed. Those who are stubborn tend to not last long. Some people are naturally more adaptable than others; but that doesn’t mean you can’t identify and solve issues plaguing your ecommerce business. Here’s how to overcome the nadirs of ecommerce.
Your Product Pages Aren’t Optimized
If you didn’t even realize that product pages could be optimized, don’t worry. You’re not the only one. Your products appear in search engine results partially based on how well the pages’ search engine optimization (SEO). Google and other companies crawl through webpages with automated bots. These crawler bots go through all the content on each webpage—text, images, keywords, meta descriptions—and assign search relevance based on what they find there. Using long-tail keywords to let crawler bots know what’s on your site optimizes all of the content on your ecommerce store. Google bots also factor site load speed into their optimization score. Make sure your e-store removes any unnecessary plugins or code that might slow it down.
You Have Multiple Pages for the Same Product
Depending on what you sell on your ecommerce site, you might have certain products that have multiple versions of the same things. For example, clothes often come in different colors or patterns. If you are making individual product pages for each variety, stop doing this. This might seem like a good idea, but it’s actually killing your product’s search engine ranking. Having a separate page for each version of an item dilutes its authority across several pages. You want all those pages to be combined so your product will show up higher in organic search results. Your cloud based ecommerce platform should have an easy fix for getting all versions of a product to be on one page.
Your Mobile Presence Is Lacking
It’s no longer okay for ecommerce store owner to ignore the prevalence of mobile shopping. About 80 percent of consumers use their phones for shopping. This means that if you’re not catering to these people, you’re missing out on a lot of potential sales. Most good ecommerce providers have mobile-responsive sites. Having a strong mobile user experience is a necessity for ecommerce store owners trying to stay competitive in today’s world of online retail.
Your Shipping Costs Are Too High
It might not seem like a big deal to you, but high shipping costs will kill ecommerce sales. Shipping costs are one of the top reasons why people abandon their ecommerce carts. You can try to get some of those people back with email reminders. But if that shipping cost is still there, they might just be turned off again. Offering free shipping might not seem like a worthwhile investment, but it can certainly pay off if you start generating more sales as a result.
Your Site Lacks Security & Trust
For every ecommerce website, customer security should be on the top. Providing security to your customer gives your business an opportunity to build strong trust and reputation. Therefore, ecommerce business is recommended to install wildcard ssl certificate on their server. A Wildcard SSL Certificate secure unlimited subdomain like login.example.com, register.example.com, store.example.com hosted under the primary domain with a single certificate. You can purchase Wildcard SSL certificate from here. There are also various benefits of premium wildcard SSL such as unlimited server license, desktop & mobile browser support and unlimited certificate reissuance during certificate lifespan.
Your Site Keeps Getting Hacked
Customers don’t like hearing that their information has been compromised. You hate having to tell them this. If your ecommerce site has loose security, this could very well be a recurring problem for you. Luckily there are ways you can work to increase the security of your ecommerce store. If you have multiple employees with access to the store, make sure you don’t give more permission than necessary. Also teach your employees how to make safe passwords; or else just give them a randomized password. These things can both make it harder for malicious parties to gain access to your ecommerce store. You also need to make sure your firewall and other software is all up to date. If you really need help, it might be best to just hire a cyber security expert.
There can be some rough patches when learning how to run an ecommerce store. Fortunately, other people have already made a lot of these mistakes, so you can learn from their example. Don’t get too discouraged if you find yourself in ecommerce despair. You will almost certainly be able to find a solution to the nadirs of ecommerce.
Community manager at Visual Contenting. Jacqueline loves to talk about social media trends, new technology and how they help businesses accelerate their marketing efforts.
