Launching an E-commerce enterprise seems relatively easy at first. However, a lot of eCommerce merchants are still unable to sustain their online stores for too long.
A huge number of brands fail to gain any return on their investment (ROI). With this In a long term, they suffer heavy losses and collapse.
Failure can be attributed to various factors, however the truth remains that sustaining an e-Commerce store is complex, as it involves meticulous planning in both the pre- and post-launch phases. Beyond this, you also need continuous enhancement to grow and scale your online business. Legacy solutions are not enough to aid your business operations anymore.
A lot of eCommerce brands fail to live up to the expectations of their consumers. Businesses are also finding it difficult to cope with disruptions, as the ongoing pandemic has affected the supply chains of many eCommerce companies. As a result, they couldn’t get to their target audience on time, thereby leading consumers to choose competitors that reinvented or adjusted their strategies sooner.
5 Key Factors That Can Cause E-commerce Failure
In order to validate the success of your eCommerce store, it’s important that you tackle the following key factors that contribute to E-commerce failure:
Lack Of SEO Strategy
E-commerce SEO is necessary to rapidly lift engagement, increase sales, and enhance revenue. In the absence of proper SEO, a company’s ranking on search engines can be hugely and negatively affected. Lower-ranking leads to less visibility, which in turn leads to low click-through rates (CTR). As such, your eCommerce website gets very little traffic.
In addition, when the traffic to your eCommerce store plummets, it would further decrease the chances of conversions. Therefore, an eCommerce store relies on orders (conversions) to sustain itself. More so, experiencing lack of sales, you will discover yourself at the brink of bankruptcy or even turn to external resources to pump funds into your brand. It’s therefore crucial to always consider checking your meta tags, links, schema, sitemap, keywords, URLs, and more for an impactful SEO campaign.
Lack Of Valuable Content
Content is remains king, and paramount for any eCommerce store. Create engaging but yet persuasive and informative content. In a B2B or B2C business model, buyers really desire to understand every little detail about the products or services that you offer. The only way to enlighten them about your inventory, aside from sales representatives, is basically via content.
Your sales representatives and your entire workforce should focus on fetching leads and other brand development activities. Content educates your consumers, therefore if they choose to contact you, they would have more particular queries. Reason? Because they already must have read through the brochures, FAQs, blogs, case studies,certifications, spec sheets etc. Additionally, content is vital for your SEO strategy.
Lack Of Personalized Shopping Experience
Businesses ought to adjust their messaging according to their target audience. Analyze the demographic and display promotions that are most suitable for them. Differentiate your buyer base and customize your communication with each. Futhermore, in B2B, clients want inventory, payment, prices, shipping, and more adjusted- depending on their relationship with the seller.
Also, in a B2C business model, buyers love to see offers that are more aligned with their attributes. Each segment that shops on your eCommerce store has a special background. Therefore, you can’t afford to showcase same set of provisions to someone in Texas versus someone who engages with your store from Malaysia.
Lack Of Customer Trust
Conveying the credibility of an eCommerce business is paramount. Nobody wants to purchase from a store that appears shady or/and dubious from the get-go. Never forget that your buyers are sharing sensitive debit and credit cards information. The lack of trust signals can adversely put off even the most willing buyer.
In addition, the credibility of your brand is equally crucial, as the presence of adequate certification will address this problem. Quality certificates from a well-known organization will calm the buyer’s nerves. Security seals on your stores, like Norton and McAfee will further build more confidence. More so, setting up an SSL certificate for your e-commerce store to activate the HTTPS padlock is also mandatory, if not compulsory to create trust and guarantee security.
Inefficient Inventory Management
Again, in an omnichannel model, the lack of visibility between multiple touchpoints can become a challenge for the merchant. Inventory syncing can be a solution to this challenge. Centralize your inventory from a single dashboard. In essence, automate your entire inventory management process and rely less on manual processes. Automation will enable you regulate your inventory even more accurately.
It’s however important to always avoid OOS challenges and get help with tracking. Beyond this, you would get to see raw materials, stocks, shipment, and more from within the inventory software. Automatic inventory syncing helps stock updates to eliminate overselling. Adjust inventory in real-time and prevent delays in fulfillment by accurately showcasing the current availability of items. View the updated stock count across all sales points in as it’s being changed.
Summary
When you market online, you’re competing against the best experience the customer has access to, be it online or offline. When technological innovations are shaping the future of the e-Commerce business model, you don’t want your eCommerce business to be on the loose end. Your store audience or users will often expect a personalized, seamless or/and simplified service.
To wrap-up, e-commerce is advancing fast, and many brands that enter the domain rarely survive beyond the first year. The competitive and brutal nature of the industry demands that brands equip themselves with robust state-of-the-art solutions.
