With faster internet speeds and better smartphones, it is easy to understand why e-commerce is growing rapidly. People prefer to shop on their phones and love the convenience that online shopping provides. You can learn more on this site. But even with that being the truth, e-commerce businesses face a lot of problems starting up and keeping the business running.
We’re going to take a quick look at 6 of these issues and how you can deal with them.
Problem 1: Not Knowing What To Sell
At the beginning of your e-commerce journey, you might be confused as to what you should offer to your customers. This is especially a problem for clothing companies. Even with intense customer research, this decision does not come easy.
But if you want to test out ideas, there is an easy way to find out what customers like. All you have to do is set up an integration with a print on demand service. The print on demand service takes care of manufacturing, shipping, and fulfilment so that you can focus on what matters. You can start with t-shirt printing online and then graduate to other items that you eventually want to offer, like leggings or jeans.
The print on demand model works well because you don’t have to stock inventory or be responsible for the acquisition of supplies, find a manufacturer or figure out the delivery logistics, which is time-consuming and expensive. Same works for white label supplements since they are products manufactured by one company and sold by another under their own branding. This allows businesses to quickly enter the market without investing in manufacturing processes. With customizable packaging and labelling, companies can offer their own line of supplements efficiently and cost-effectively.
Problem 2: Not Offering Discounts
While it seems counterintuitive to generating revenue, customer acquisition, in the beginning, depends on the pricing. 71% of people believe they will get a better price online than in a physical store.
With that information, you have to figure out pricing that is lower than what a customer might pay for it in a store and also include additional discounts to lower your customer acquisition costs. Typically, this is possible since e-commerce businesses do not have to worry about having storefronts and the enormous costs that come along with it, but it can be a tricky thing to figure out when you’re just getting started.
Problem 3: Not Being Able to Attract The Right Customer
For a new brand, this is a massive problem. Your ideal customers are out there, but they just don’t know that you exist. Focus on the customer personas that you think will purchase from you and start distributing your content and product on those channels. This includes leveraging a comprehensive digital marketing strategy so that you can generate brand awareness and keep users engaged.
Problem 4: Not Attracting Good Quality Leads
If you are in a popular category or you offer a free trial, you might notice that you’re not getting a lot of traffic, or you may be getting hits, but it is not the right kind. First, focus on improving your content. Content is king. If you provide value to the user, you will be found, and it also helps nurture leads. If you haven’t been collecting reviews, start doing that since reviews help other customers make decisions. Next, you may want to take a look at UpSwell Marketing. They can help you with your marketing and even lead generation to bring in some quality targeted customers.
If you are offering free trials and notice people abusing it, switch to an opt-out free trial wherein you ask for credit card details or offer a paid trial.
This will eliminate people that are not serious about your product or service or don’t have the intention to purchase.
Problem 5: Not Seeing Enough Conversions
Most B2B companies are sales-led. This means that the sales team does outbound or has to perform demos for prospects. This is an incredibly time-intensive and expensive process. This is also not a scalable process for growth. Instead of being sales-led, you might want to make the shift to becoming a product-led company. In this growth model, your product speaks for itself, and you create self-serve pricing tiers that do not require sales teams to intervene unless necessary.
If you serve enterprises, consider offering a free trial or a usage-based trial where they can experience the product before they buy it.
If this is done right, the leads that eventually make their way to sales will be of high quality since they have had a chance to try the product. This also helps grow the self-serve model quickly and in a scalable manner.
Problem 6: Not Being Able To Retain Customers
If you have trouble with customer retention, there are three possible reasons for this. One is that your support isn’t as effective as it should be. This includes customer support teams and help articles that live on your online help desk. Two, your product is not living up to their expectations.
Or three, you are not communicating new updates to your customers. To tackle these issues, you must have a holistic view of the customer journey. If a customer churns, ask them why and figure out where the problem lies. Make support more accessible and improve the quality of your help articles by including videos.
If your product needs improvement, invest in a product team that can work with marketing and engineering to help users get the features they need. And finally, make sure you leverage content throughout your funnel and communicate important updates to your customer.
All in all
These are some of the common problems e-commerce businesses have and some possible solutions. Having a community around you when you run into issues can really help to overcome them quickly.
