Starting your own eCommerce site is tricky. Even if you know how to design it or how to promote the products, there’s always something you can oversee.

Ideally you should be able to use different channels to reach your audience and have a tight scope of your product offer, but that’s not how great number of businesses think at the beginning.

To avoid going in a different direction, here are some of the biggest eCommerce mistakes small eCommerce businesses make at the very beginning of their existence.

Lack of Focus

You want to sell clothes and you start an eCommerce shop adding all the products you previously handpicked. This way you’re competing with almost every eCommerce site on the Internet.

Think about how you can achieve greater focus in the niche you’re a part. If you truly want to sell clothes, try with something more specific like hats or hoodies.

Selling “hoodies with NBA prints” is always a better starting point than selling “clothes”. By getting specific with your product offer, you’re also setting up the grounds of being specific with the audience you target.

Starting with a smaller group of products or a single product is a good foundation for scalability. You can start selling bike breaks, progress to bike handle bars, and work your way to bikes. Start with a specific product offer and work your way up the ladder.

“Build it and they’ll come” Attitude

Having an online store isn’t enough anymore. You may be good at web design and you think it’s a good idea to build a functional page, but that’s not what it takes to make your business a success.

Surely, good website design and functionality is welcomed, but without a solid marketing plan you’ll have a masterpiece hanged up on the wall that nobody pays attention to because of the bad lighting in the room.

Contrary to the narrow product offer scope you need to figure out at the beginning, your marketing mix should be as broad as possible from day one.

Having different marketing channels in your marketing mix doesn’t mean that you’ll need to focus on each one of them at all times, but you should always test as many traffic sources as you can before deciding which ones to pick.

The approach we explained in the previous chapter should help you out with the targeting of your audience, and once you get to that point it would be easier to figure out what are their communication mediums of preference.

Complex Purchase Path, One of The Most Serious eCommerce Mistakes

Simplicity is the key, when we talk about user experience. Till now you have developed some online presence and the traffic is pouring in to your site. Thanks to the narrow product scope you attract just the right type of audience, but are these people converting from visitors to buyers?

The number one reason why your conversion rates are low is the complexity of your purchase path, which represents the lifecycle of the buyer on your site.

If you have a complex purchase path, it’s most likely the visitor will abandon it if he feels like it’s too much. Big websites today allow guest purchases and one click purchases to avoid this.

The one thing you can make to ease up the buying process is adding the buy now button wherever you can and decreasing the number of clicks needed for a visitor to make a purchase.

Abandoning SEO

The eCommerce world is filled with misconceptions and unproved theories and one of the biggest ones is that you can’t compete with other companies on Google, simply because you’ll always see Amazon or eBay in the top 5 results.

The reason why sites like Amazon and eBay rank for their products is because they have enough authority that they don’t need any SEO optimization. Sellers using these sites use this power and just publish their products without even thinking about SEO, because in their opinion Amazon has them covered.

You can always compete with Amazon and eBay and similar sites if your page provides enough value to the end reader. Depending on the niche, in most cases you’ll be able to provide more value than sellers on Amazon.

Create a detailed product description about your product, engage with your audience to get some positive reviews in the comment section of your page and use as much rich media as you can, while managing to implement some SEO best practices.

Looking Unprofessional

This is somehow connected with the “Build it and they’ll come” approach, with the only difference that here we take people that’ve built the webpage, created a marketing strategy, but forgot that they need to build a brand as well.

You’re always building a brand. No matter if you have dozens of affiliate sites or you just want to make your own online shop selling handmade ornaments, you’ll need to think about branding at all times.

The first thing you can do is to hire a freelance designer to make you a company logo. After that, make sure that you have an informative About Us page where you showcase some of the most important things regarding your business, and a Contact page that’s fully functional.

Once you setup an environment where people can learn more about your business, starting gathering reviews from your audience and all the people you’ve done business with. This can only improve the overall trust flow you build on your site.

Something else you can consider is taking ownership of all social media profiles with your brand name and building up some content on them.

Not Knowing Anything About Your Customer

The overall design of your website and its functionality should trigger user engagement and increased conversion rate of your specific products that are supported by the authority you’ve created about your brand, but who are you trying to reach?

All of the things we mentioned previously should give you a better insight into your target audience or at least you’ll be able to easily create a perfect buyer’s persona.

Once you increase the knowledge base about your target audience you’ll be able to use your marketing channels more effectively and create marketing campaigns that will convert your visitors to buyers.

Start by exploring active communities about the niche or industry you’re in. If you’re selling NBA jerseys, start following forums of NBA teams and subreddits about basketball.

This way you’ll get more information about your audience and have a nice place to research keywords for your SEO strategy. Your marketing strategy, PPC campaigning and content plan will be thankful.

Not Being Able To Find or Create an Edge Over Your Competition

You can always create an edge over your competition with the help of communities and the audience you target.

Find a huge problem troubling your audience that hasn’t been solved by any of your competitors and do a little work of finding a way to solve it. Then you can publish this content on your website and promote it through the communication channels you’ve already set up.

Sometimes the information is available on the Internet, but there’s just not a good presentation method available. Just gather all the available info and create a user friendly resource that your audience would love to consume.

In other cases you can create an edge over you competition by using promotional techniques that include freebies or discount offers, which is something connected with the pricing strategy you’re using at the moment.

Conclusion

Building an eCommerce site is like building a real life brand. You need to consider how you appear in the eyes of your audience if you want to make any sales.

Having a good platform like Shopify is a good starting point, but you should always think about improving your presence by using additional apps, and finding ways that will allow you to optimize your marketing activities like our RooJet software.