There are dozens of blogposts and articles featuring lists of ecommerce mistakes.
This is unsurprising, of course. If you're going to provide a service to ecommerce retailers, it makes sense to write about ecommerce mistakes. Content Marketing 101. Everybody wants to know where they're going wrong, what mistakes they're making. A blogpost about ecommerce mistakes makes sense.
But...
- How do you navigate a space that's already saturated with such blogposts?
- How do you tell which of these articles to read?
- Does Google actually know which blogposts are the most authoritative?
- How do you know if you're missing out?
We did you a favor: We read everything and looked for recurring patterns.
We Googled "ecommerce mistakes" and read every single thing we could find. We read blogposts by everyone from Paul Graham (who wrote about ecommerce mistakes way back in 1997!) to lesser known bloggers from branding consultancies, shopping cart review sites, entrepreneur guides and more.
We decided to pick the best and most authoritative posts (pretty much everything you'll find in the first 3 pages on Google), and then we started plotting out the points they made. We looked for similarities and differences, and started identifying patterns. Here's a little glimpse into what we put together:
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Mm, all that juicy data![/caption]
After a lot of crunching and mulling, we organized the data in a way that we found meaningful. We figured that the best way to do this would be to follow the natural cadence of the customer's journey through a given ecommerce store.
Here are the 6 primary categories of ecommerce mistakes, in 'chronological' order:
- Critical Business Mistakes – We're looking at your fundamental business model here. If you screw this up, even the best website and marketing won't save you, because nobody's interested in buying your stuff.
- Marketing Mistakes – You have a valid solution, but your customers don't even know about it. How do you find your first customer? This is about lead generation.
- Common Website Mistakes – You have customers who want to buy your wonderful products, but your site is broken.
- Customer Experience Mistakes – Your site works, but it's hard to use, hard to navigate, slow to load... just frustrating. Your customer lands, but leaves.
- Closing Sale Mistakes – Suppose your store is an absolute breeze to navigate. Despite this, some customers stay away- because of shipping costs, or missing information about return policies, etc.
- Post-Purchase Mistakes – Do you follow up? Do you measure what works? Do you work towards a community for your customers? This stuff is icing on the cake for smaller companies, but it could also be their competitive advantage.
Click through the above links to go to infographics that that spell out the specific mistakes you might be making. We hope you find it useful!