Common Mistakes in eCommerce Sites
March 13, 2012
Is Your Contact Information Detailed and Visible?
Customers want to know that they are not being scammed into paying. They want to know that it is a real person or a real company they are paying to, and that this real person or company can be reached if there is a query later. If your contact information is not visible and detailed, you are probably not telling the customers that you can be trusted. Avoid this mistake by putting your contact information at a visible part of every page on your website, in the header, footer or sidebar. A contact form, email address, phone number and mailing address can inspire trust and allow the customer to know that it is alright to buy an expensive or technical product from you because if there is a problem, they can get in touch with you.
How is Your Checkout Procedure?
In case of a big and established eCommerce site, customers are happy to sign up or register because they know they will come back to the site and that the site will have more interesting things to offer them. But for a smaller site, registration often is what puts customers off and they go away without completing their order. Keep the checkout procedure short, and give the customers an option to save their information in case they want to get back to the site at a later date. Tell them that this information will be stored and retrieved later if they come back to shop again. Keep the contact forms short and relevant and this will avoid the cardinal mistake of driving away a customer before completion of order.
Make Payment Options Simpler
Many sites make the mistake of acception payment only through MasterCard or PayPal. A lot of customers do not want to use their credit card for shopping. Some prefer net banking and some would want cash-on-delivery options. Use a payment service that is versatile and allows your customers to choose from different payment modes, credit card, debit card or net banking. Customers have different preferences for online shopping and using multiple modes of payments helps you expand your customer base.
Having an eCommerce site means taking a lot of factors into consideration. How customers shop, the analysis of data related to customers’ behavior on the site and having your own systems working optimally are just a few of them. Make sure that shopping on your site is smooth and easy, and there is no reason why your eCommerce site cannot be one of the few that actually work.