5 Reasons Why Your E-commerce Business May Fail
Ever since it became possible to perform transactions on the Internet, e-commerce has continued to grow. According to statistics, over $1.2 million is generally spent on e-commerce websites around the world every 30 seconds. According to predictions by experts, this amount is estimated to grow significantly to a total of more than $2.3 trillion by the end of 2017 and the industry is projected to generate a hundred billion U.S. dollars in revenue in the U.S alone by 2019.
So popular is it, that every aspiring entrepreneur wants to venture into e-commerce. I also started an e-commerce website for my university 3 years ago but due to many reasons (bad planning being the most significant), it failed miserably. I had to sit back and analyze the whole situation, I read numerous articles and the success stories of other entrepreneurs, trying to figure out what went wrong. Then I realized that it takes more than a great idea and money to make a successful e-commerce website. To avoid making the same mistakes I made, here are 5 reasons why your e-commerce website may fail:
A Poorly Designed Website:
Having the best business plan cannot simply overcome the problems that you’ll have with a bad website design. A website with a poor browsing experience, poor design and navigation will lead to increased bounce rates because people will immediately leave your site almost as soon as they arrive.
Low web traffic:
Having a well designed website with great content doesn’t really matter if you have nobody visiting your site, does it? Failure to take advantage of social media, emails and forums to constantly advertise your business website is the major cause. Sooner rather than later, you’ll hear crickets chirping in your website’s background.
Way Too many competitors:
Let’s be honest here, the e-commerce industry is already extremely saturated. If you think it’s going to be easy for your new website to displace the heavyweights already dominating the market, be ready for a big disappointment. You know you can’t simply compete with large e-commerce websites based on price, so unless you have a great strategy to differentiate yourself from others, your store will not succeed.
Website Security Issues:
Just when you thought you had enough potential issues to worry about, it’s time to consider the security of your e-commerce website. Hackers and identity thieves constantly patrol the web looking with vulnerable websites to hack. Website security issues can be a nightmare for entrepreneurs who fail to invest in the security of their websites. Without third-party security scanning, the personal information of their customers could get stolen right from under your nose.
Not Building Customer Loyalty:
Getting new customers to do business with you is no easy task. People may eventually decide to give you a try, to see what it’s like buying from you. But the major problem now is developing trust with your customers and ensuring they continue to come back for more. Loyalty is something that you can’t simply buy with money, you have to provide a unique experience for your customers that they can’t resist coming back for more. Offering live chat to your e-commerce website helps to create, build upon and maintain healthy and positive relationships with customers.
Price Competition:
Online merchants frequently compete using the price system. The price competition badly affects small e-commerce businesses because large competitors are easily able to offer products for less price and free shipping, while you, on the other hand, might not be able to afford to offer products for the same price. Offering a service like 4x Buyer Protection to your customers will give them a price match guarantee. You pay for 4x, and 4x pays for any price differences. It’s a win,win, win for everyone.
While this may seem like a million reasons to flee from e-commerce businesses, there’s always a solution to every problem if only you decide to find it and develop a reasonable strategy.
This article was written by Emmanuel Ozigi, a biochemist in the making from Nigeria. In his spare time, he’s a science, health, and fitness blogger. He also specializes in graphic design and photo editing. He has an insatiable hunger for information and the desire to learn new things. Visit his blog at http://sciencehealth24.com.
