Why Many Online Shops Fail Before They Break Even

It takes a significant commitment for an e-commerce business to succeed. Setting up all the systems for such a platform alone can be arduous. It’s why many people look to experts to help manage and set up these systems for them, be it an IT Support Melbourne small business firm or a larger platform online. Still, once things are up and running, it should all be smooth sailing, right? Well, perhaps not. A major reason online ventures fail before recovering the initial capital is poor digital marketing. Lack of visibility on the search engine is like having a physical store in an accessible place. How will people know it exists in the first place?

Since online stores depend on web traffic, there’s a need to implement a digital marketing approach to let people know the e-commerce address. Otherwise, no one except our friends and family would know what we are selling online. Thankfully, we can use many brand awareness tools to boost our sites’ visibility on the internet for the first few weeks in business. At this stage, we haven’t established consumer trust. So marketing is absolutely essential since growth cannot happen overnight.

Let’s look at some mistakes we should avoid if we want to push our online shops to the break-even point and beyond.

Unqualified Traffic

For the optimum conversation rate, we need as much traffic as our e-shop can handle. When calculating potential sales, we believe that only a certain percentage will convert into clients out of a huge volume of traffic. The problem comes when we get unqualified traffic. The chances of converting the wrong audience, no matter how big, are meager. We should target and filter the information, so we don’t promote our site to the wrong crowd. They may like our Facebook pages and follow us on Twitter, but some people can never become our customers.

Narrowing down our focus connects us to the perfect clientele. A target audience usually shares interests such as music, vacation style, food taste, and hobbies. We can use these insights together with relevant messages to target the best clients. Traffic is qualified if all the audience likes our offerings and share our brand values. In essence, these are not random strangers but people who are close to our products. That means they are more likely to purchase.

Lack of Vision and Strategy

If we don’t have competence when starting a business, there are higher chances of failure before it breaks even. We have the responsibility to fight for our eCommerce shops so they can keep running. Keeping it in operation requires a very clear vision and a strategy. If the business is doing great in its first month of operation, we want to push it to do better. It is good to learn from other online merchants’ mistakes to know how to handle challenges before it’s too late. Remember, the competition in the digital world is very tough because of the vast coverage of the internet. Remember to be smart when choosing keywords to rank for your business. Be smart in choosing keywords, if you have a pawn shop, you can do keyword based on your location, like USA pawn shops or if you have optimized business listings you can also use keywords like, “near me”, “pawnshops nearby”, etc.

No Contact Details and Return Policy

The contact address of an online shop must be visible all the time. If we are looking to make a sale, there is no reason to hide a phone number. Lack of contact information can harm our credibility, and people may not trust us with their payment methods. Similarly, we must provide a return and exchange policy because most buyers check for this before placing an order. Shoppers prefer e-commerce sites with friendlier return policies, so we have to make it good. For instance, free shipping for returns can give us an edge over similar merchants with return costs.

Poor or No Customer Support

There are many methods we can use to respond to our customers’ queries. Live chat, telephone, and email are the most common customer care options. If we cannot actively support a phone number, then there is no point using it. As for the live chat support, it must have a time zone. In most cases, new customers need help with placing orders; thus, quality support is a great way to serve return clients.

As we have pointed out, e-commerce businesses mainly depend on online visibility and effective marketing. Our investment in SEO and marketing must be robust. We should plan for these before launching an e-shop. This includes a detailed digital advertising strategy and bulletproof search visibility. We also want to ensure there is a market for what we are offering. That way, we can escape the list of 80% or more e-commerce shops that fail too soon.