5 Pain Points of eCommerce & How to Avoid Them

Getting Found Online

The greatest challenges for businesses online is getting their website found and creating return visitors. Potential customers have to find you before they can buy from you, right? Then, to foster brand awareness and recognition, an online business must provide a memorable onsite experience. Driving traffic to your site involves many strategies including search engine optimization and email marketing to remind visitors to come back.

Search Engine Optimization

Your SEO strategy begins with an eCommerce platform that provides SEO-friendly features. Your platform should help increase your exposure by providing the ability to optimize pages for keywords relevant to your business in the URL, titles, body, image alt-tags, headings, tags and meta-descriptions. Optimized site pages allow customers to easily find you for real language searches. Start by envisioning the thought process of your potential customer who may not know your brand yet.

What would they type in Google to find your products or services? Strive to rank for these keywords whether they are highlighting your products, services or location.

Effective Email Marketing

Did you know that personalized emails targeting individual consumers generate 18% more revenue than general one-size-fits-all emails?To personalize your emails to target individual consumers you can use the data gathered from your website visits found in your analytics. Invite visitors back to view a product category from a page they visited recently or provide a discount if they browsed but never made a purchase.

SEO Friendly Features

Who searches Google using product numbers to find an item? The answer is nobody searches for products using obscure numbers. So, then why list products on your website using random numbers rather than product names and descriptions?

Customizing the Customer Experience

So, your site is optimized to rank well on search engines and visitors are pouring in. Awesome! But, now what? The key to closing your online sales lies in personalizing for individual consumers, recovering abandoned carts and eliminating obstacles that could jeopardize the sale.

The most successful sites online leverage customer history, site behavior and social media to improve their websites. Review site behavior to see if there is a trending flow to how visitors navigate your site or drop off (for example, they may leave when shipping costs are added). Personalization can be employed to present dynamic and targeted content to consumers who are onsite, enticing them to complete a purchase or add to it. When carts are left filled with items, you already know that customer intended to purchase, so you can send them cart abandonment emails with discounts or free shipping to invite them back and seal the deal.

The Key to Customer Satisfaction

Once an order is placed, most customers count the days until they receive their package. What happens when their package is late or even worse, what happens if it does not arrive at all? Fulfillment and logistics are part of every sales process when actual goods are being sold.

Most businesses depend on a third party vendor, like UPS, for shipping. Make sure you build a clear complete logistics support flow to ensure that order information is communicated to your shipping and logistics partner.

When searching for an eCommerce software provider, be sure that they can integrate with your logistics provider to automate and manage orders across all channels.

Poor Logisitics = Perilous Results

There are real costs associated with poor logistics from a lowering of ROI, loss of customer trust and loyalty, and employee time spent fixing the problem. These additional costs are above and beyond what is spent on storage, warehousing and shipping costs to your business! Dealing with logistics takes time and resources away from sales efforts, but merchants ignore these vital pieces at their peril – bad logistics will quickly start affecting.

Mobile is Crucial for Merchants

Mobile commerce revenue reached $170 billion in 2016 and is estimated to exceed $694 billion by 2019 (hostingfacts.com). Global mobile commerce now makes up 34% of all eCommerce and that number is only expected to grow even more in the coming years (smartinsights.com).

Most people own a smartphone these days and people are increasingly using them to do routine things, including shopping. Simply check your site analytics - you can see how many visitors come from desktop, tablet and smartphone. You’ll see that mobile site traffic is on the rise. So how do you equip your business to get ahead of this trend? Make sure your eCommerce site is responsive and can be viewed properly on any device. Also, be sure that transactions can be made effectively using any device.

Responsive Design

A mobile-friendly website begins and ends with the use of one responsively designed site that represents your entire organization. Responsive Design is a methodology employed to setup websites to respond to user behavior and environment. If developed this way, the website automatically adjusts the layout of content based on the screen size, orientation and platform used by an individual visitor.

eCommerce Must-Haves

A successful eCommerce solution must bring together two must-have elements: a web platform that helps you drive and manage customer conversions and logistic services to support inventory management and shipping while helping you maximize revenue.

Bridgeline Digital helps customers maximize the performance of their complete digital experience – from websites to intranets to online stores and marketing campaigns.

Deeply integrating Content Management, eCommerce, Marketing, Social Media Management and Analytics, Bridgeline ensures that your business delivers an online presence that attracts, engages and converts customers across all channels.

Through an integration with UPS Warehouse Management System (UPS WMS), Bridgeline also seamlessly combines eCommerce with logistics and fulfillment management covering your needs from click to ship.