3 Common eCommerce Mistakes

Everyone who uses online ecommerce systems will go through a basic learning curve and probably make some pretty common mistakes. Here are a few of the top ones:-

Home Page Story Telling
When a visitor comes to your site it’s usually because they have a task they wish to complete such as looking for a product (comparing) or purchasing a product. There may be other tasks visitor is trying to complete when they visit your store but those are the two major tasks.

Now neither of those tasks is made easier for the visitor if the first thing they encounter when they visit your site is lengthy welcoming text. Firstly, very few visitors will read the entire copy that you have written in fact most will read barely the first few sentences at all. Secondly unless the text is very well written and manages to keep the visitors attention what are you trying to achieve if all you have written is some copy about the company and it’s values?

The golden rule is this. Get to the point and do it quickly.

As much as we may want to believe that our visitors are interested in our company and it’s origins they are not. Visitors are interested in quality products at competitive prices. So what we need to be doing is optimising our landing pages using graphical representations of our products and getting straight down to business.

Poor Product Images
This is such a big mistake and it is made by alot of us. We spend time and energy on building our site, writing brilliant copy, designing our theme etc and then we bypass the importance of displaying our products in the best possible light. Virtual stores are just like physical stores, the product is king and is first and foremost.

Make sure to always have high resolution images of your products and try to have as many alternative images as possible.

Magic Mystery Categories
What makes sense to us as store owners does not always make sense to those who visit our stores. The logical classification of products that we have in our heads may not always match up with our visitors especially the more technical the range of products we try to sell becomes.

For example, have you ever been frustrated by supermarkets and the way the categorize their products? Spent time wandering round looking for something and given up or had to ask for help?

Don’t let this happen at your site. Make sure your categories are labelled clearly and with your visitor in mind even if this means that you place items “technically” outside of their traditional categories as long as the user can find them.

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