If you think about the way people shopped before and the way they shop nowadays, you’ll find a tremendous change. Thanks to online shopping, you can now shop effortlessly and find what you need on the Internet. While this gives businesses the chance to bring in more revenue, it also comes with its own challenges.
Whether you own a huge eCommerce company or still trying to grow your startup online retail store, there are unique challenges you’ll come to face sooner or later. These do not only include finding the right products, boosting online traffic, and attracting the right clients. These also involve generating quality leads and improving customer retention and acquisition. Aside from these, the following are the other issues that you will face as an online retailer:
Turning visitors into buyers
When you have an online store, it is not enough that you drive traffic to your website. Your main concern is how to turn site visitors into paying customers. Since they are shopping online, you often have to rely on your website and products to make revenue. What you can do is to improve your website, make clear product descriptions, and have an easy checkout process. Offer different payment options, encourage clients to post reviews, and always have friendly customer support to assist site visitors.
Handling returns
Online consumers have great expectations when it comes to your eCommerce store. These include you providing them with easy return policies. How you handle returns can boost brand loyalty, or you might end up losing clients. What you can do is to implement a good return policy and take advantage of reverse logistics technology to support your return process. This way, you can reduce the impact returns have on your company and make sure that customer loyalty is retained.
Shopping cart abandonment issues
Having many clients with products on their carts does not necessarily mean that your business is thriving. According to Statista, almost 75% of carts were abandoned in 2018 alone. This means that you could be losing sales more than making conversions. Reduce cart abandonment by simplifying the checkout process. Improve the security of your site and be upfront with shipping costs. Consider offering free shipping and eliminate surprise fees.
Data security issues
Data is something that can easily be hacked these days. If you are not careful, you may end up losing precious business data to cybercriminals. If you cannot give your customers enough reason to trust your website with their details, then you’ll have fewer clients paying for your offers. What you can do is to choose the right platform, manage your own servers and switch to HTTPS. Keep your security plug-ins updated and never store your clients’ credit card numbers.
These are only a few challenges that you will have to deal with when running an online retail store. Some can be similar to and at the same time quite different from running a physical store. Boost your success by keeping this list in mind.