Starting an Ecommerce store is amazing! 

And, because the estimate says it’s a trillion dollar market, you can profit mammothly from it. 

But, here’s the actual thing:

The Ecommerce Industry Is Not All Rainbows And Unicorns.

And even without a ground plan, you are fortunate enough to experience small thwacks along the way—nothing as such that can’t be fixed. 

The rest, though, can be catastrophic and can bring your business to where it all started! 

But, the best part is – you can always turn your cards around. 

In case of any slip-ups, all you need to do is find a reliable way to overcome them. 

But, before we step ahead, if you are skirting the edge of starting an ecommerce venture, forget the rewards coming with it.  You can easily hire the best ecommerce development company that can craft your path. But, the most crucial thing is to avoid common mistakes so that you can succeed in the ecommerce industry. 

Here, you will learn the most common mistakes that every ecommerce owner makes, along with quick fixes to resolve them quickly. 

#Mistake 1 – Redefining The Buzzword

Often, a new ecommerce brand tend to fall prey to the following two pitfalls:

• Trying to develop a unique solution for everything
• Clutching something entirely contrasting together

You should not be pouring down the drain of your resources on developing custom solutions to the challenges you face unless that customization has a crystal clear and direct impact on your branding along with an ability to offer a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

Besides, you can use already existing platforms like Magento or Shopify, instead of making efforts to craft something yourself until an Unique Platform is the selling point of your brand. 

The Tip: Most customers are looking for a familiar shopping experience with a friendly design and navigational elements. 

This holds true for shopping carts, your shipping fulfilment and every other element of your business. And, if it’s not your unique selling point, hire ecommerce developers who specialize in handling it. 

Channelize your energy on the key difference between you and other brands in the domain. 

 #Mistake 2 – Fictitious Design 

A study conducted by researchers at Northumbria University found that the design of a website weighs more into whether users find it trustworthy compared to any other content on the site. 

This is among those areas where you surely should not try your hands unless you happen to be a seasoned designer yourself. Instead, you can use a reliable and tested ecommerce platform with an up-to-date, modern theme if the design is not a differentiating factor for your brand. 

If the design is pivotal to your brand, invest in the best ecommerce developers in Dubai without leaving any room for mistakes. 

#Mistake 3 – Repetitive Product Descriptions

Considering SEO perspective, the everyday issue I observe with new ecommerce websites is repetition in the product descriptions. 

If your descriptions are limited to publications provided by the product manufacturer, you can get prepared on receiving next to no search engine traffic on your respective product pages. 

Why?

Because Google will see these product pages as duplicates of others somewhere else, your results won’t show up on the first page. 

Also, it’s common for product descriptions to make no effort to overcome buyer objections, understand the customer journey, or make comparisons that will give them a reason to buy the product from your ecommerce platform rather than from somewhere else.  

Even product descriptions make up the most important content on a page and should never be ignored. If, in case, your inventory list is colossal, follow the Pareto principle and focus on your highest selling or most profitable products. 

#Mistake 4 –  SEO Errors Are Common 

Ecommerce websites, especially marketplaces, are more prone to SEO errors than any other type of website. These errors can prove to be significant obstacles to search engine traffic, which is not all but crucial for an ecommerce business to thrive.  

Technical SEO is a vast discipline, and working with trusted ecommerce companies in the UAE is recommended if you don’t want to have a burning hole in your pocket. 

#Mistake 5 – Not Being Rewarding (Really!)

This point sounds laughable, but it’s significantly common for a new ecommerce site to be rooted in a business model that can quite simply never be profitable.  

You can think about how things will scale and be willing to do the math and make projections. So, if your business isn’t profitable at the moment, and your cost scales with production, you will lose money if sales spike. 

After all, profitability is a far more crucial goal at the beginning than growing, and you must prioritize it over scale while you are working out the kinks in your business. 

# Mistake 6 – No Targeted Market

  Buyers look for a reason to shop from your ecommerce store instead of Amazon, and a big part of it is constantly funnelling to culture. So, if you are of the mind to beat the ecommerce mammoths, you need to select a targeted market and also earn that audience’s trust.  

The pivotal to this is a customer profile, a portrait of your ideal user and the context to craft the path driving to you. This sheath:  

• An understanding of their interests
• Needs that your product will solve
• Crucial values

The right approach followed by a trusted ecommerce development company to achieve it is with an amalgam of data analysis and some real-world conversation involved. Remember, the more focused you are, the better you will be able to connect.

#Mistake 7 – Is Design Responsive?

It’s less common to find a website that is not using a responsive design than it once was, but it’s still seen with some frequency. 

Therefore, your website needs to function well despite what device someone uses to view it. 

Around 51 per cent of millennials now purchase through their smartphones, and that number is still growing. Surprisingly, mobile spending reached $111 billion in 2020, which is up 30% from 2019. 

Once again, this is one of the main reasons to use a widely tested theme with minor customizations unless a novel design is focused on your brand. You can even try your theme with Google’s mobile-friendly test and stress test it with as many devices as you can get your hands on. 

# Mistake 8 – Difficult To Manage Shopping Carts

Remove as many steps as possible from your shopping cart process, and don’t pressurise them to set up an account in order to give you money. 

If a consumer has decided that they want to buy one of your products, of course you don’t want to be an obstacle in their way. 

So, keep buttons BIG and clear while text is small and minimum. Lastly, don’t surprise them with hidden fees. 

#Mistake 9 – No Skip To Logo 

I again remind you to stick to trusted themes with minimal customization for most cases, especially to offer consumers a familiar experience that follows web conventions. At the same time, the only exception being if the novel design is an element of your Unique Selling Proposition. 

LOGOs are one place you definitely don’t want to skip on the customization aspect. 

Your logo is your brand’s identity, and in many cases, it’s the only visual image a customer will keep in mind for your brand. 

Are you wondering if template text with a brand name in the theme is enough?

It’s actually NOT! 

It’s worth investing in a designer to help you design the best logo for your brand, but if there is a glitch, there are several tools available to help you design a logo. 

#Mistake 10 – Crummy Customer Service 

In a research by the Harvard Business Review, it was found that customer service interactions are four times more likely to prevent losing a customer than they create customer loyalty. This is subtle yet a substantial difference. 

Even the executive surveys usually find that their goal with customer service is to “wow” the customer with something amazing. But, what keeps customers is simply delivering on the basics.  

Initially, customers want their concerns to be resolved ASAP, ideally with a single call, without being passed to another or given the runaround. This is why it is extremely important to factor the cost of effective customer service into the cost of the product. 

Also, it’s essential to recognize that current customer service should be multi-channel and is for sure not confined to the phone call. 

#Mistake 11 – Blank “About -Us” Page

The new ecommerce brands scrimp on the “About-Us” page because they observe that it doesn’t generally bring in a great deal of search engine or referral traffic.  

So, if you have a quick rundown at your analytics, you will discover that a significant portion of your visitors stop by the page before they scroll ahead. 

Despite the cliche, the About page is an important place to get your Unique Selling Proposition across, so invest in the time.  Yet, another challenge is a “Bio” of About page that offers context about your business but not a great deal of “what it has for you”. 

The subtle difference is – your About Page is not about you; it’s about the customer. So, ask your partnered ecommerce developer in Dubai to give the right amount of information portraying your business ethics. Still, the goal should be to address how this context serves the customer. 

#Mistake 12 – Bridge The Right Gap In The Market

The term “Unique Selling Point” has shown a lot of times here, and if you are rolling out an ecommerce website, you probably know you require one, but it would be a goof if not mentioned here.  

Often, it’s common for new ecommerce players to spot the difference. It isn’t enough to focus on a specific product type if consumers can still find those products on Amazon.  

So, having a USP is more crucial than having a niche or a market sector to focus on. 

Your business model needs to address an actual gap in the market. Also, it needs to solve a problem that other businesses are not solving to give your users utter satisfaction. This is an uphill task but is necessary. 

#Mistake 13 – Dull Visuals Are A Turn Off 

It’s pretty evident that attractive and clear visuals are a must for an ecommerce store to do well, but some things need that extra edge to make the most of it. 

Some products lend themselves more to visual comparison than others. 

Even the product descriptions in the browsing portion of the website can be a distracting element, especially in apparels, but it is crucial in other circumstances.  

#Mistake 14 – Navigation Made Difficult 

This is another space where reinventing the wheel should be avoided unless it’s pivotal to your USP. 

Simple, don’t stray far from the best navigation practices: 

• Provide users with top-niche categories that are accessible from the top menu. 
• Allow users to sort based on the essential features like review scores, freshness, price, and the list goes on. 
• Anything clickable should be large enough to tap on a mobile phone easily. 
• Offer the user a search function. 
• Clicking a product should directly take the user to a product page with information that will help them overcome any roadblock, and the “Buy” button should be prominent and easy to find. 

#Mistake 15 – Deficit In Social Proofs (Client Testimonials)

If you are perplexed to include user reviews on your ecommerce site, I can tell you that this is almost always a win, especially if the reviews are vetted only to include actual buyers of the product. 

So, please take advantage of third-party integrations because it’s worth including customer reviews and question raising sales by 18 per cent.  

But, still, if you are afraid of negative reviews, here’s something worth paying attention to. 

The variability star rating acts as an upthrust for sales. 

While a higher average score is undoubtedly a good thing, the user expects some negative reviews and get apprehensive if they don’t see any. 

The Final Thought… 

You want to stay ahead of the competition and curate a nook at the top of the industry. But, to do that, you need to learn from your competitors’ mistakes while keeping your eye on the payoff. 

By being aware of the most common pitfalls that other entrepreneurs encounter in eCommerce, you can turn a blind eye to the unexpected costs. With a reliable team from leading ecommerce companies in the UAE, you save your time exponentially.   

That’s not all! 
With experts, your ecommerce website is optimized for success along with an array of happy, loyal and repetitive customers.