Over five billion people use the internet worldwide, 58.4% of whom make purchases online every week. This makes for a large and exciting pool of customers for your start-up.
According to Forbes, over 90% of e-commerce start-ups kick the bucket in the first 120 days. Here are the top three common sales mistakes to avoid so your business can thrive rather than dive.
Ignoring Customer Reviews
Podium estimates that a whopping 93% of customers have made purchase decisions based on reviews. So, if reviews aren’t currently a top priority, you might just be hurting your online sales.
However, it’s not enough to collect reviews. Responding to customer reviews, whether positive or negative is just as important. Buyers are interested to see how you deal with criticism. A prompt and friendly response is in most cases appreciated. Simply acknowledge the issue, apologize, and work on a resolution with the customer.
Online sales courses recommend you treat reviews as part of the nurturing step in the sales process. In this way, you can build customer rapport and a loyal following.
Getting a customer to your website takes a lot of time and energy, but that’s only the first step. Keeping the customer engaged long enough to make a purchase is the end goal. Unfortunately, poor or confusing navigation can often put customers off and see them waving goodbye even before anything goes in the cart.
Steer clear of the following to improve your website navigation:
- cluttering your menu bar
- using unclear or irrelevant menu items
- not using standard menu terms to direct customers to the right site content
Slow Page Speed
Page speed is up there with website navigation as far as your bounce rate is concerned. With the decrease in people’s attention span over the last decade, today’s customers are unlikely to wait for a snail’s pace website.
According to Portent, the best converting page-load time is between zero to five seconds. The highest conversion rates for e-commerce websites are generally in the first two seconds.
If you need to cut back on the page-load time, consider:
- upgrading to a premium host or dedicated server
- implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- compressing images
- activating browser caching
