6 Reasons Why Your Ecommerce Website Is Going to Fail

You’ve got the right product and the right price but for some reason your website isn’t producing the sales you thought it would. Take a step back, grab a cup of tea and take a look at these 6 points on why you’re not selling anything.
1. Your website navigation sucks
This is a biggie, If a visitor thinks its hard to find what they are looking for, they will leave; simple. Making visitors work hard is never a good idea; if you want your visitors to part with their hard earned cash, make sure they can find your products as quickly as possible. Functions like breadcrumbs, drop down menus, search bars and simple descriptive categories will make your website ‘easy to digest’ and keep visitors interested.
2. The website design sucks
Invest some time in looking at the design of your website, is it consistent throughout? Are the pages cluttered? Does it load quickly? In ‘s own tests they found that for every 100 millisecond increase in the page load time of their website, sales decreased by 1%, ouch! Making sure you strike a balance between design and functionality is not always easy but it will ultimately have an effect on how many sales you make.
3. What product descriptions?
Not having enough product information will cost you. Give as much detail of a product as you can, including; weights, sizes, shapes, colours, add ons, pros, cons and so on.
You need to be able to answer questions your customers have before they are able to ask them. Imagine you were buying the product, what information would you want on hand? Don’t forget, giving good and relevant content with your products will have a positive effect on your Search Engine Optimisation.
4. Poor product images
A picture is worth a thousand words – don’t underestimate the importance of good quality photography, you can convert a sale based on product imagery alone and the more photos the better.
Try and get the best out of your product by showing off its features and showing it in use. This will also increase your customer’s confidence in the product making them more likely to make a purchase. Using product galleries and thumbnails can help you get as many images in front of the visitor at the same time.
5. No one has ever heard of your website
You ticked all the right boxes, but don’t expect customers to come flooding to your homepage! Take a good look at what you are doing to increase the number of visitors to your website, both on and off the web. Is your website Search Engine Optimised, are people going to be able to find your site easily?
Being at the top of Google for a certain keyword can make a business, if you are getting a lot of traffic already you can use tools like Google Analytics to help you understand what your visitors are doing once arriving at your website. Analyse these statistics and make changes to improve your page visits, bounce rate and visit duration.
6. You’re not answering the right questions
By having an online shop, you are ultimately taking away a physical point of contact for your visitor. As such you need to have all the questions about using your site answered and readily available.
If they can’t find out how long the item will take to be delivered, or perhaps what payment methods are available before they hit the checkout, the chance of converting into a sale is greatly reduced. Try and make your visitors experience as pleasant and simple as possible.…