Having an online marketplace is clearly a big advantage in today’s world. Your store can be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you can reach consumers around the world, with no additional expenses such as mass mailings or cold calls. But it’s not as easy as simply putting up an electronic storefront and calling it good.

Websites are a varied bunch, each one has something that the other doesn’t offer. But, websites have similarities too, and unfortunately, many ecommerce sites make the same mistakes. These common mistakes are often subtle, and difficult for the site owner to recognize unless someone points it out to them. The good news, however, is that these common mistakes are often easy to fix. Read on for a list of 15 common mistakes made my many ecommerce retailers, and what you can do to remedy it. Taking steps to fix these mistakes will open up your site to a whole new world of customers.

1. A lack of detailed product information

When you think about the advantages that a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer has, it can seem crazy to even consider the idea of online commerce. Customers can walk inside, out of the weather, be greeted by a real person. Maybe, if it’s the holiday season, they’ll be offered a cup of cider while they browse. They can pick up items, feel them, smell them, ask questions about them. Customers can’t do any of these things in an online store. That’s why your product descriptions are so important.

What To Do About It 

Be as descriptive as possible. If there is more information than what you can provide in your item blurb, direct customers to an FAQ page with enhanced and related info. Try to anticipate what questions someone might have if they were to pick the item up in a traditional retailer: What sizes do you have? What colors? How does it work? Does it need batteries? What does the bottom look like? Is it convex or concave? Can I return it if it doesn’t fit? Go into detail with any pertinent information. If a customer doesn’t read your description and get the answers to the questions they have about it, they will simply click away and go to another site.

Many people will tell you that the text on an e-commerce site needs to be short. This is not exactly true. There are concerns about having customers scroll too much, but a skilled web designer can create an effective e-commerce website that allows room for lengthy descriptions while still maintaining usability.

2. Hiding Contact Information

Every article on website usability will tell you that not having your contact info on a site will cause you to lose trust with your potential customers, yet there are still site owners who insist on hiding their contact info. Here’s the deal. The Internet is growing at such a huge rate that people are going online everyday who have never been online before. They are reading blogs, joining social sites, and shopping. They want to know that the purchases they make are secure, and that they can talk to someone if they have a problem. Bottom line: no contact info (or if the consumer can’t find it easily—and believe me they look) means consumers are less likely to trust your site, and therefore less likely to do business with you.

Are you worried that customers will want to return their merchandise if you put your contact info on the site and you will go out of business? If that’s the case, you don’t have much of a business to defend, because people simply won’t buy from you in the first place.

What To Do About It

Pretty simple right? Put your contact information in the header, footer, or sidebar on every page of your website. And on a Contact Us page. Provide complete street and mailing address, phone number, fax, and email.

3. A Long or Confusing Checkout Process

This is a common problem among site owners, and unfortunately, one of the most damaging. You might have great products and great prices, but if no one can figure out how to order them, you won’t make the sale. Recently I was shopping for an item for a sewing project for my wife. I went to a website that came up first in Google for my search term, “white silk ribbon.” It only took me two clicks to realize I wouldn’t attempt to place an order with this site. Clicking on the category “ribbon” brought me to a menu of color choices. Clicking on “white” brought me to a page titled “ribbon” but with no photos or product. From the home page, this site looked as though it had hundreds of ribbon choices and would have exactly what I wanted. But I looked around a few more seconds and left, for good.

What You Can Do

When a customer wants to give you money, make it as easy as possible. Take them right from the item to the shopping cart. The more obstacles in between the landing page and the shopping cart, the les likely you are to make a sale. Even an un-savvy online shopper knows that there is an easier way to buy something.

The ideal checkout process should be for a customer to click on an item and add it to their cart, then go to a page for them to enter their payment info. Then they should see a shipping information page, then an order confirmation page before they submit their order. Anything more than that is an obstacle.

4. Requiring an Account to Order

As discussed in the above paragraph, requiring that a customer create an account before ordering constitutes an obstacle. If you make the sale, you can always get more information later.

What To Do About It

Offer customers the option of signing up for an account (or newsletter, or podcast, or whatever) at the end of their ordering process, after they are enthralled by how easy and fun it was to order from your site. If they choose, they can save their account information to make placing future orders easier. Don’t fret if they don’t choose this. There are other ways to gather information. In the package with their item, include a coupon with a code for 10 percent off their next order if they return to your site and rate the item. Then you’ve got three-in-one gold: a testimonial, a happy customer, and a repeat customer.

5. An Inadequate Site Search Engine

A search engine on your site takes visitors directly to whatever they’re looking for. They may be searching by brand or item, and they’re not sure if you carry it or not. Let’s say you do carry the brand they’re looking for. But you have a crappy search function. So they can’t find it without sifting through a page of unrelated results. No sale for you.

What To Do About It

Refine your search option so that it doesn’t return hundreds of semi- or non-related results. Many ecommerce software providers offer differing levels of site search; some will search your site to Google’s level of relevancy. Ideally, an ecommerce search engine should let users search by keyword and then refine results. Users should be able to sort through the results based on certain criteria, such as by product or category, for instance.  

6. Poor Customer Service Options

Customers will want to contact you for answers to questions they have about their order. Perhaps their item was not the color they expected, or arrived damaged, or doesn’t fit. They have rights as consumers and the first place they will look to for answers is to you. This is similar to the issue of not providing contact information for your business. If it’s not easy for the customer to contact you if there is a problem, then they will not trust you.

What To Do About It

Make it easy for customers to get in touch with you if they have a problem or question. Provide an email address for technical questions, an email address for sales questions, an email address for returns. Provide a phone number. Create a culture of customer service in your business. I once ordered an item for my child, and the actual shipping costs were significantly different than the estimated shipping costs that I had paid. Before I even was aware that there was a discrepancy, I received a call at the phone number I had provided and was assured that I was being credited the differing amount. This person happened to call while I was on vacation, so I didn’t respond right away. He called again, and when I finally spoke with him, was apologetic and helpful. Did I order from this site again? You bet I did. 

7. Inadequate Product Images

Going back to the idea of advantages of a brick-and-mortar store, tiny images make it even more difficult for consumers to know what they’re buying.

If for any reason the image can’t be rendered, because the person is using a slow or incompatible browser, an alt tag attribute is shown on the screen. Ideally, the alt tag is descriptive of what is in the photo.

Another aspect of images that is often not considered is how blind people would interact with your website. People without sight want to order items for themselves and gifts online, but, obviously, they can’t see images. They often have reader software that reads text on a website. When the reader gets to an image, if there is no alt tag, in other words, text that describes the image, the reader can’t tell them anything about it.

What To Do About It

If you must provide thumbnail size photos, allow users to click on them for a larger view. The image should enlarge to about 1024×768 pixels.

Use well-written alt tags for your images. For example, you might have a photo on your site of a t-shirt. A well-optimized image alt tag might say: <img alt=Lemon yellow ring-neck t-shirt with small green frog hopping to the left and a white daisy on the right side.”/> This is what reader software would read, and what would appear on the screen in the absence of an image.

Not to mention, the practice of using alt tags also helps you take advantage of Google’s Image Search.

8. Only One Product Image

Similar to the above issue, one product image is not generally enough. People want to see not only the front of an item but the top, sides, and back too.

What To Do About It

Provide multiple images from different angles, along with an image in each color. If there are certain special features or technical details, these should have their own pics too. It may seem cumbersome to have that many images on the site, but a skilled designer can strategize ways to display them that don’t compromise site usability.

9. A Poor Shopping Cart

For an ecommerce website, the shopping cart is just about the most important piece, and it has many jobs to do: add items to the cart for purchase, add multiple products across categories, revise quantities, select colors or other options, and be easy for the consumers to use.

What To Do About It

There are many bad shopping carts, unfortunately. If you are evaluating a shopping cart provider, a good system should let a user add an item directly from the product page and then continue shopping from the last page they were on. Quantities of items on the cart should be revisable and easily removable, with capability to select options like color or size, and it should provide clear information about shipping charges before they enter in their credit card info.

10. Lack of Payment Options

While it may be convenient to you to accept only Visa or MasterCard, that is not convenient to the user. There are many other payment options and your site should offer them. Most are easy to set up and integrate.

What To Do About It

Provide payment options for other major credit cards. There’s also PayPal and Google Checkout. And some people won’t have credit cards or PayPal accounts and will want to pay by electronic check. Bottom line, provide as many payment solutions as you can.

11. Not Including Related Products

One of the reasons that Amazon has been able to dominate the market so successfully is that they have mastered the art of the suggested and related sell. If Amazon remembers a user from a previous visit, they display the user’s name on the home page along with the text “We have recommendations.” Under that is “Other items you might consider,” and directly underneath that is a link to “Find similar items.” Below that is a list of items “Related to Items You’ve Viewed,” with “Find similar items” below it. Below that is a list called “Customers with similar searches purchased,” with a link to “view or edit your browsing history.” And below that is a list of new, unrelated items they are suggesting, a different list of items they are recommending for the user, along with items they are advertising displayed on the sides. And this is all before you even search for anything!
 
What To Do About It

Many ecommerce platforms have a “suggested product” or “related product” feature. Some are more sophisticated than others. Some, for instance, will let you manually choose related products, since you will be able to relate items more effectively than a program can (such as coordinating items in an outfit). Utilize special item suggestions, sales, up-sell, cross-sell, shipping offers and other incentives to make the sale.

12. Confusing Navigation 

Every car is different, and so is every website. But, they all have some basic things in common. Gas and brake pedals are on the floor, there’s a steering wheel and dials and gauges. Some dials may be on the dash, some on the front of the console or in the middle, but anyone used to driving a car will be able to look in some expected places and figure out how to drive the car. With website navigation, if a site is set up to be very different from what people expect, users will be confused and leave.

What To Do About It

Navigation should be on the top or left side. Items should be separated into broad categories, perhaps by style, brand, or other specification and then group smaller categories together. If you don’t have any items in a particular category for whatever reason, hide that menu. Categories should have at least a handful of items in them.

13. Inaccessible Shipping Rates

Access to shipping rates is a key feature that surprisingly, many sites don’t provide. Recently I attempted to order from a site that offered me additional “bonus” products along the way to check out, but the shipping language was confusing. It wasn’t clear if it was an additional $3.50 shipping per “bonus” item or if the fee of $3.50 for the original item I wanted would cover the bonus items. Since I couldn’t review my order before clicking OK, I opted not to make the purchase.

What To Do About It

Provide a clickable link from the shopping cart and bottom navigation menu that opens up to a new window with shipping rates and policies. If you have zone-based shipping in which you add rates based on geographic area, a map can show customers how much they will pay. Plugins and widgets can be added to your site to calculate shipping via USPS or UPS based on ZIP code. If these options won’t work for some reason, then use a flat shipping rate and state it clearly.

14. Not Including Store Policies

Earning a customer’s trust involves letting them know what your return policies are, privacy policies, shipping costs, hours that customer service is available, and other basic policy information.

What To Do About It

Customers will not email you or call to ask for this information, so it must be presented to them in an easy to locate format. Have a policy page, include policy info in an FAQ page, and clearly spell out what customers can expect if they have a problem, question, or concern.

15. Having An “Untrustworthy” Site

Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint what makes a site not convert well. It may be as subtle as being too flashy, with too many jumping Flash animations, having an odd color scheme, or too many capitol letters that scream “THIS IS SUCH AN AWESOME PRODUCT YOU JUST HAVE TO BUY IT OR ELSE!!!!!!!” The goal is to sell products, not have people go to your site and notice how flashy it is. That said, if the focus of the site seems to be too much about selling, as if it’s a smarmy used car salesman, people will leave.

What To Do About It

Strive for a clean, well-designed site that is easy to navigate from the home page to the check out. Focus on providing useful information about your products and answering the questions the users may have about what you sell. Design elements should work together harmoniously to create a sense of trust, security and high quality merchandise. Neon dancing bears and jingle bell soundtracks no longer meet that standard for today’s tech-savvy online consumers.

Summary

If you’re starting your website from scratch, you have an opportunity to investigate these common mistakes and avoid them. If you are dealing with a website that was pieced together, do what you can to improve things one step at a time, and realize that there is always confusion as a store grows and expands. A good designer will help you minimize those issues.

No one’s website is perfect. Even the websites of major conglomerations can have snafus and usability issues. The important thing is not whether your site has problems, because the websites of many (maybe most) small-to-medium-sized businesses do have problems. Being able to recognize when your site is not converting as it should, and addressing the problem is the attitude that will help you take your site to the next level.

Limelight Department is a full service advertising agency that specializes in internet marketing for businesses across the US and Canada. Our experts utilize proven strategies of website development, media design, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, copy writing, content distribution and many other services to send targeted, ready-to-buy traffic to your site. Visit LimelightDepartment.com for more information.