10 Common eCommerce Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

The following are the most common eCommerce mistakes and how you can avoid them. 

1. Cyberattacks and Data Breaches

Cyberattacks and data breaches are among the most serious hazards for ecommerce platforms. According to a study, cybercrime against ecommerce sites was the most prevalent, accounting for 32.4%. These attacks can result in stolen client data, economic loss, and reputational harm.

2. Neglecting Market Research

One of the most common eCommerce mistakes business owners make is neglecting market research before establishing their eCommerce business. 

According to small biz trends, 90% of eCommerce businesses fail within 120 days of establishing themselves, which reveals that having a poor marketing strategy is the top reason why new businesses fail. 

Conducting market research is essential to helping you gather valuable insights to develop your marketing strategy.

It is the first crucial step you must take to avoid the unsuspected difficulties of running an online store.

Market research helps you gather valuable insights into your audience’s needs and behaviors, get ahead of the competition, make informed decisions, measure success, and overall reduce your risk of failure.

To conduct market research, you need to analyze market trends identify and understand your customer’s problems and desires, and research your competitors.

Not doing adequate market research will cause you to make unfavorable decisions that will hinder your business growth.

To avoid this, make use of market research and analytic tools such as Google Trends, Facebook Insights, Jungle Scout, Ahrefs, Niche Scraper, the U.S. Census Bureau, Quora, and Reddit.  

MORE: Best Amazon keyword research tools 

3. Not Building a Brand 

Another common mistake most eCommerce business startups make is not putting in effort to build a brand. 

Your brand identity is an essential aspect of your marketing strategy. It creates a long-lasting impression on your customers and helps differentiate you from your competitors. 

Developing a strong brand identity goes beyond creating a logo, using attractive color themes, and using appealing typography. 

Your brand identity encompasses several

elements that shape your customers’ perceptions when they interact with your brand. 

These elements include your brand history, values, vision, packaging,  message, and overall personality. 

As the eCommerce industry becomes increasingly competitive, developing a strong brand identity will reduce your risk of getting outcompeted. 

According to small biz trends, getting outcompeted makes up 23% of the top reasons why eCommerce startups fail.

So, to avoid this, you want to pay adequate attention to building a strong brand identity, conducting market research, crafting a compelling brand story and message, and defining your unique value proposition and selling point. Also, you need to discover your brand voice and tone and create a unique feel for your brand.

MORE: 3 Ways to be more effective at marketing your online store

4. Neglecting Social Media Platforms

Another common eCommerce mistake some brands make is only creating a website and not branching out to social media platforms or paying attention to their social media channels. 

Not having a strong social media presence can result in low customer reach, poor online visibility, lack of brand awareness, and low customer retention, and you can easily get overshadowed by your competitors. 

To avoid this, try using social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, to promote your products and engage with your audience. 

Consistently posting and engaging with your customers will build trust and help you attract and retain new and existing customers. 

Although consistently promoting your products across all social media platforms can be time-consuming and a lot of work.

So you want to deploy social media automation tools to help you manage your social media tasks without manual labour.

You can use automation tools like Social Pilot, Sprout Social, Buffer, Zapier, Agora pulse, and HubSpot to handle your social media activities.

These tools will not only help you create amazing content to promote across all platforms, but they will also provide you with detailed analytics and reports to help you track the success of your social media content and campaigns. 

With this, you can make data-driven decisions that will help improve your content and campaigns, increase your engagement levels, and raise brand awareness.

MORE: How to sell on Facebook in 2024

5. Neglecting Website Optimization 

Failing to optimize your eCommerce website for mobile users can pose a great threat to your website navigation. This can lead to poor shopping experience and, as a result, a drop in sales. 

According to Statista’s marketing insights, 60% of eCommerce sales are from mobile devices, and eCommerce sales revenue from mobile devices reached $2.2 trillion in 2023. 

Also, a report from PR Newswire reveals that 60% of consumers say they’ll leave a brand for a competitor after a poor website user experience. 

This means that poor website optimization will not only make you miss out on sales opportunities but will also make you lose loyal customers to your competitors. 

To avoid this, consider optimizing your site’s architecture. This includes everything from your site URL, caching, mobile optimization, product category, product organization, and overall functionality of your website.

You want to pay attention to your site speed, design, image, and font size, content, and technical SEO issues.

This will help increase your website visibility, enhance functionality, improve user experience, and boost your conversion rates. 

You can use the following website optimization tools for your eCommerce store to help you win customers over:  

• Site audit,
• Hotjar, 
• Page speed insights, 
• Uber suggest, 
• Ahrefs, 
• Kraken, 
• Optimizilla. 

MORE: 5 Ways to make your eCommerce site faster

6.  Not Including Content Marketing Strategy

One of the biggest eCommerce mistakes businesses make is not investing in content marketing. 

Some businesses are too reluctant to include content marketing in their strategy because they feel it isn’t all that effective, or it’s too difficult and takes a lot of time to achieve results. 

While content marketing can be a bit of a hassle, with the right approach, it can be an incredibly effective marketing strategy to boost your conversion rates. 

A survey from Clutch reveals that 82% of people have purchased a product from a company after reading content published by the company online. 

Nowadays, retail shoppers search the Internet for information about the products they want to buy. They want to read and also compare products from several brands.

So, including some sort of educational or informational content about your products and publishing it online can help you reach more customers who are more likely to convert. 

You also want to consider using bold and attention-grabbing headlines to attract and engage your readers:

Make sure your content doesn’t sound redundant, cut the fluff, write concisely, and use appealing and relatable images in your content, like memes, gifs, and infographics.

You also want to consistently publish content to keep your readers engaged with your brand and increase website traffic.

According to HubSpot, companies that publish blog content regularly get 50% more website visitors than those who don’t. 

MORE: eCommerce blogging – 7 reasons why you should start a blog

7. Neglecting SEO Content

Neglecting SEO content results in poor online search visibility. This makes up 35% of the top reasons why eCommerce businesses fail. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) content involves producing content that is designed to make your site rank highly on search engines like Google. 

According to Meteorspace, 43% of eCommerce brands get traffic from organic searches on Google. 

This means that as an eCommerce business owner, if you don’t implement SEO in your content strategy, your site won’t appear in consumer’s search results, and you’re more likely to miss out on potential customers and a lot of sales. 

Fortunately, there are many tools you can use to help you optimize your website for SEO. 

Tools like Ahrefs, MozBar, and Semrush have amazing features to help you optimize your website’s content, URL, and webpages and also improve your website’s authority. 

However, you must remember that you’re one of many sellers who are competing with a large number of other eCommerce brands to rank highly in search results. 

So, here are some important SEO tips to help you rank higher in search results:

• Target low-competition keywords,
• Use FAQ sections to rank for long-tail keywords,
• Align your content with consumer search intent,
• Publish high-quality content,
• Use Google search console, 
• Use visual content like infographics, videos, gifs, or podcasts in your content.

MORE: 15 SEO tips for eCommerce websites

8. Overlooking Data Analytics 

With the fierce competition in the B2C industry, data analytics is vital for your eCommerce business’s success. 

Data analytics provides you with actionable insights into your customer’s behaviour and website performance. 

It helps you make informed decisions to improve the shopping experience and increase sales. 

If you ignore data analytics, your business can suffer some downsides, such as missed sales opportunities and poor marketing decisions. 

To avoid this, you need to regularly review your website metrics and customer data to identify areas for improvement and fine-tune your marketing strategy. 

You can use tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Optimizely, Hotjar, Crazy Egg, glew.io, and Monster Insights to track your site traffic, engagement levels, cart abandonment rates, conversion rates, and more. 

MORE: 7 Things you should do to improve eCommerce conversions

9. Complicated Checkout Processes

A survey by monthly installment payment solution Splitit reveals that 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts during the checkout process. 

On top of that, 55% of these shoppers admitted that they’ll not only abandon their carts but also never return to the retailer’s site if the checkout process is too long or complicated. 

This survey shows that a simple checkout process will ensure that customers complete their orders and prevent you from losing customers to your competitors.

The best way to simplify your checkout process and reduce cart abandonment rates is to:

• Not require shoppers to create an account before checkout:

Some vendors require shoppers to register during the checkout process to get them to subscribe. 

This might be a great idea to build an email list, however, this approach makes the checkout process lengthy, making them reconsider the order. 

• Allow guest checkout: Instead of making new customers create an account during the checkout process, you want to enable buyers to checkout as guests for a smooth checkout process.  You can either capture their email before or after the checkout. 

• Avoid unexpected costs: Make sure to include all pricing in the ‘Buy Now’ section. You don’t want to surprise buyers with taxes, shipping costs, and other unknown expenses when checking out, as this can lead to cart abandonment.

MORE: The order fulfillment process: Every step from receiving to returns

10. Not A/B Testing 

Far too many eCommerce businesses fail to include A/B testing in their marketing strategy. 

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing strategy where you split your audience into two sections, A and B, and promote two versions of a campaign to each audience and compare which version your audience responds to better. 

By identifying what resonates better with your customers, you can use this information to optimize your marketing assets for better results. 

You can split test several elements, such as the copy, images, design, headlines, and CTA buttons of your website, and marketing campaigns like pop-ups, ads, landing pages, or emails.  

Doing this helps lower your risks of failed marketing campaigns and, overall, develop a stronger marketing plan. 

You can use A/B testing tools like Google Optimize, Intelligems, and Unbounce to test different versions of your marketing assets. 

MORE: 9 eCommerce tips for beginners 

Takeaway Points

As the eCommerce industry becomes increasingly competitive, to succeed, you must identify and avoid these common eCommerce mistakes. 

Avoiding these mistakes starts with putting your customers first. Ensure to create a smooth shopping experience so you don’t lose potential customers to your competitors. 

Get ahead of the competition by having a better understanding of your customers, doing some research on your competitors, incorporating content marketing and SEO into your strategy, and making sure your website and checkout process are well-optimized.