Selling items online isn’t as simple as people assume. Many easy mistakes can be costly for an ecommerce business. Here are just 7 mistakes to avoid when selling online.

Not investing in professional web design

Whilst there are drag-and-drop tools out there that can allow you to create a website for free, such websites often aren’t suited to ecommerce. Your website is your store and it needs to stand out from the crowd. Investing in professional web design will help you to create something flashy that builds trust in your company and encourages people to stay and browse.

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Overcomplicating the checkout process

Your website shouldn’t just encourage people to stay, but it should also encourage people to buy. An overcomplicated checkout process can cause you to lose leads at the final stage. Try to design something that is simple and no more than three pages long. Consider allowing customers the opportunity of not having to sign up to use your service and consider adding a progress bar to tell customers how close they are to checking out.

Using bad quality photos

Bad quality product photos will immediately cause buyers to lose trust in the quality of your company. Consider hiring a professional product photographer to take pictures of your wares so that they’re the best quality possible. If you’d prefer to save money and take your own pictures, make sure to read guides such as this post at BigCommerce.

Slacking on SEO

Most ecommerce businesses get the bulk of their customers through search engines like Google and Bing. For this reason, search engine optimization (SEO) is worth investing in. Your best option is to hire an SEO company to carry out this for you as it can be a lot of work. Use of keywords, website traffic, website loading time frequency of updates can all affect your rankings.

Using the wrong ERP software

ERP software will help you to manage your inventory, sales and other business processes, helping you to keep financial records and make improvements to your company. There are lots of these programs about, however some are not truly suited to ecommerce. You want the ability to manage your website using this software rather than having to manage the two separately. Some programs may be compatible when integrated with other software – for instance when using Netsuite for ecommerce, it can be worth integrating this with a program like Verenia. This will make business admin a lot easier.

Setting prices too low

Ecommerce is a highly competitive industry and some companies feel the only way to stand out is to offer the lowest prices. However, this can result in little to no profit. Make sure that you’re covering all your overheads and that you’re actually making money.

Offering poor customer service

Just because you’re not operating face-to-face doesn’t mean that you should neglect customer service. Go the extra mile to make your customers feel happy and at ease such as offering FAQs on your site, accepting enquiry emails and phone calls, choosing a reliable courier to deliver products fast, sending thank you notes out with purchases and possibly even treating new customers with vouchers or small complementary gifts.