Starting an ecommerce business is a bit like married: the odds are not in your favour. Most enterprises end up not working out, with hopefully the person learning a lesson or two for the next go-around. But if you want to be one of the merchants who beat the odds, then RepricerExpress has five ways you can avoid going belly-up.
Reason 1: Poor Management of Revenue and Spending
Not every ecommerce business will have a Warren Buffett-sized cash injection behind it. But not every business needs to. It’s more about how you manage the money coming in and out. If you’re constantly spending on, say, marketing but not allocating money to deal with the influx of orders, your business could suffer.
One of the biggest mistakes merchants make is planning budgets around projected sales instead of actual ones. If more sales come in, you can always expand your budget to accommodate that, but it’s a lot harder going in reverse.
Reason 2: A Decidedly User-UNfriendly Website
Your website is often the first point of contact with shoppers. And if it sucks (i.e. they can’t easily navigate around, common search terms don’t lead them to where they want to end up, pictures are of poor quality, it takes forever to buy an item, the colour scheme is garish/too busy, etc.), they’ll give up and go elsewhere.
That’s it. If you don’t feel comfortable designing your own site or you can’t afford to pay someone, go with a template — and remember the KISS method: Keep It Simple, Sweetie.
Reason 3: Not Appropriately Sizing Up the Competition
You know the show Dragon’s Den? A common reason some of the dragons shy away from seemingly good deals is because the contestant (if we can call them that) is pitching a product for a saturated market. For the online world, this means some ecommerce businesses can fail because they’re trying to compete with big-box retailers right out of the gate.
Unless you’ve got millions and millions to fall back on, there’s just no way you can compete with the Apples and Amazons of the world. A more successful alternative is to find your niche, understand your competition, and cement how you fit into it all.
Reason 4: Nobody Visits
Probably the biggest reason why a business fails is because it doesn’t get enough traffic. Without visitors, it’s impossible to make sales, despite a pro-looking site and slick advertising. It is so crucial to do thorough research to understand the market, then translate that into stellar SEO practices, novel content that keeps you ranking high, and targeting the right kind of shoppers.
If you’re still stuck, study up on your competition and see what practices they employ, then use that as a template for your own.
Related: 9 Tips for SEO and Keyword Research for Amazon Sellers
Reason 5: Customers Don’t Feel Listened To Or Valued
If you’re getting traffic coming in but having trouble keeping it there, one reason could be subpar customer service. In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie says it takes a lot of ‘atta boy’s to make up for one ‘oops’. It’s far easier to build — and sustain — momentum if you make superior customer service the norm and treat every deviation from it as a serious, lesson-learning case than to fix multiple problems when operating from a low standard.
Some tips to keep in mind include:
- Responding to queries in under a day
- Clearly and prominently outlining your sales policy, including exchanges, refunds and returns
- Being available to talk to customers in multiple languages
- Knowing your products (or services) inside and out
- Keeping prices as simple and competitive as possible
Running a business isn’t easy and there are so many merchants whose ecommerce businesses fail, but you don’t have to be one of them. Keep reading RepricerExpress and you’ll be on the path to success (hey, we’re poets and we don’t even know it!). Better yet, start using our Amazon repricing software and take things to the next level. When you sign up today, you start off the awesomeness with a 15-day free trial.
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