Why Ecommerce Businesses Fail & How to Avoid it!

why do most e-commerce businesses fail [Music] what's up guys it's paul from e-commerce gold back with another video for you and in this video we're going to be talking about why most e-commerce businesses fail now before i get into the reasons why i don't want this to be a video that puts anybody off starting an e-commerce business in fact i want it to be the opposite and give you a good idea of what you need to do in order to make your ecommerce business successful so i don't want this to be a negative video instead i want it to be a positive video now there are many many reasons why an e-commerce business can fail and i'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of it i'm just going to look at four main reasons why most e-commerce businesses fail now there is a flow to my reasons why and if you notice that flow let me know in the comments below cause i'll be interested to see if anybody picks up on it but with the introduction out of the way let's move into the reasons why so the first thing is marketing or generally lack thereof this is because with e-commerce it is no longer a case of build it and they will come that might have happened 15 years ago when there was no competition around but with today's e-commerce landscape where there are hundreds of websites clamoring for the same top spaces in search engines that's not going to happen and this is where paid advertising comes in and generally you're going to be running either facebook ads or google ads because they generally generate the best return on investment but you're probably not going to do very well with these to start with this is because it takes trial and error to figure out what works and what doesn't when it comes to running ads and it's a constantly evolving process because what worked six months ago isn't necessarily going to work today so it is very much trial and error and a constant learning process now when you're just getting started running with ads make sure you set a budget aside that you're prepared to lose because you're probably going to lose your first initial investment when it comes to running facebook ads or google ads even the most experienced marketers had to go through this process to start with they didn't all hit a home run on the first go so be prepared to invest time and money into running these ads to see what works and what doesn't so you can actually start generating sales now there are alternative marketing strategies you can employ one of these is content marketing which is a basically a long-term seo based strategy to generate traffic and potentially sales to your website and if you want to learn more about that i'll leave a link in the card above and in the description below to my last video where i talked about blogging for e-commerce which some of you may find helpful but getting back on subject the reason why most e-commerce businesses fail is because their marketing strategy just isn't good enough it's not generating traffic and if it's not generating traffic it's definitely not generating sales so make sure you have a good marketing strategy in place whether it's running ads content social media whatever it is make sure you have a good and robust marketing strategy in place and always revisit your strategy because just because it was last year doesn't mean say it's going to work this year is it constantly evolving process and you need to be on top of it at all times so make sure you have a good marketing strategy in place because that's going to be your main source of generating traffic to your site now the second thing is there's issues with your website now most people think that their website is perfect but in most cases there are issues with your website and even if you have a fantastic marketing strategy that's generating lots of traffic if you're not getting the conversions then it means there's something wrong with your website and for a lot of people this is their product listing page this is because this is your sales pitch to the customer so you want to make sure it's optimized so it's generating the most amount of conversions possible and two massive factors to this are one boring generic stock images the reason for this is if they're looking for a certain product they may have seen that same image on numerous other websites or numerous other marketing campaigns so make sure you take original product images and do something a bit different a bit interesting that's going to capture people's attention boring stuck images while they look okay generally won't capture people's attention and the second thing is your product description because this is your written sales pitch and what you want in your product description is you want it to be well crafted and well optimized because this is going to be what's going to convince your customers to buy so what you want to do is you want to keep short paragraphs once two sentences maximum use things like bullet points to list the main information because this is easy to consume for your customer don't create a big block of text because most people aren't going to read through it they want to just skim over it get the information they need so they can go and buy the product so that is your product page effectively there are other issues on the product page that you may want to address things like your add to cart button might not be optimizing very well now the next stage is your checkout process and honestly you want this to be as streamlined and as optimized as possible because you want to narrow the amount of time it takes from your customer to make that decision to buy the product to actually going through and completing the payment so you want to eliminate as many distractions as you can and this is a trap i see a lot of e-commerce companies fall into is they try up sales on their product pages now there's a lot of different opinions as to whether or not you should do this but from my experience it's always been better to limit the amount of options there is to take the customer from making the decision to buy to checking out so upsell products is going to distract your customer because they're going to think oh should i look at that as soon as you start taking them away from your checkout process you're basically taking them away from that buying process they're back to browsing so for me don't have upsells on your checkout pages another thing you want to avoid on your checkout pages is a discount codes box if you don't offer discount codes this is because a lot of customers will actually navigate away from your website to try and find a discount code and as soon as they've gone away from your website there may be a chance that they're never coming back so if you don't offer discount codes or gift certificates anything like that remove that box from your checkout make it as streamlined as possible you want a good example of this just look at amazon when you're on amazon prime you have one click checkout this is because it minimizes the amount of time it takes for the customer to buy that product they know they need to convert as much as possible so eliminating all possible distractions and options between making that decision to buy and actually buying it are removed so you want to follow the same process optimize your checkout process as much as possible remove any unnecessary pages to make it quick and easy for your customers to check out and the final thing about websites is you want to make it as trustworthy as possible now a lot of people when they're just getting started don't really know what kind of information they need to include on their website and there are a few things that can really help build trust with your customer the first thing is contact details a lot of people overlook this or they'll just have a simple contact page no you want to offer multiple contact options so you want to have a phone number an email address a contact form and potentially live chat as well if possible make it really easy for your customers to contact you and make it so they'll very quick unresponsive so someone sends a product inquiry respond to it as quick as you can because they're still going to be thinking about that product and if you respond instantly there's going to be more chance of the customer going through and buying that product so make the contact options a priority because people want to know there's people they can contact the next thing is be very upfront and honest about your policies don't bury everything in the terms and conditions this isn't a good strategy yes you can include it in your terms and conditions but really you want separate pages for your payment policy shipping policy and returns policy this is because people can quickly navigate to it and they know exactly what the process is should they want to return a product or how long is it going to take from ordering a product to them hopefully receiving it make sure all this stuff is upfront and honest because it's just going to build that trustworthiness in your website so the third thing is customer service if your customer service sucks people are going to let you know and they're also going to let other people know as well things like facebook places like trustpilot google reviews any place where people can post reviews they will do if they've had a bad experience with your company and people are much more likely to post a negative review than they are a positive review trust me i've been there and i actually offered really good customer service but sometimes you just can't make everyone happy but you do want to make customer service a priority both in your post sales and your after sales because it doesn't matter when you're speaking to your customer you want your customer service to be top-notch so if a customer wants to return something don't make it difficult for them make it easy and simple remove any obstacles that you can because it's less likely that that customer is going to go and leave a negative review for your company and trust me if you're a small company and you get a few negative reviews it's going to take a lot of positives to overcome that and people will generally navigate to the negative reviews before even considering reading through the positive ones for some reason it's just the way that we operate i don't know why that is something to do with psychology but we want to know what the bad thing is when dealing with a company which is why people will go to negative reviews so make sure your customer service is on point make sure that you offer excellent customer service you're not rude you're not ignorant you make things as easy as possible for your customer because this is going to reduce the chances of negative reviews and potentially increase the chances of people leaving positive reviews which is going to help your business no end so basically customer service is a hugely important part of running any type of business especially e-commerce and once again we can look at amazon as an example of this the customer is always their top priority if there's an issue they get it sorted quickly this is because customer service is a priority and it's one of the things that has massively helped amazon grow so it is a hugely important part of your business and offering bad customer service can really sync your ecommerce business very quickly now the fourth thing is patience or lack of and i get to see this firsthand not only did i see it with myself when i first got started in e-commerce but because of the way e-commerce gold works people go through and sign up to platforms through my affiliate links and i get to see how long these people with these platforms and for a lot of people two to three months is the maximum amount of time they give their ecommerce site to work honestly this is way too short of a time period you need to give you at least 12 months to get any real kind of traction with your website just looking at organic search results the first six months google's not going to pay any attention to your site because it's trying to figure out if it's a genuine site or if it's a scammy spammy site because a lot of sites that start and close very quickly are generally quite scammy or spammy one of those two but it's going to be that next six month period between 6 and 12 months where it's going to start looking at your site and thinking oh this might be a genuine website we'll start to show it in our search results now i'm not going to guarantee that you're going to appear number one but you'll start appearing in search results and after that six month period you will generally start to see a growth in impressions in google search results so you do need to give it that kind of 12 months potentially up to two years to see if it's going to work and an e-commerce business is exactly the same as any other business it takes time in order to things to work whether it's ranking whether it's generating a customer base whether it's growing a social media following it's going to take time it's not going to be an instant success and basically it doesn't matter whether it's an online business or an offline business it's going to take time to work this is because the days of getting rich online quickly are pretty much gone i know a lot of people preach it it's really easy to make money online blah blah blah blah blah it's not it's like any other business it's going to take time and effort and this is going to apply to your marketing campaigns as well your first second third possibly up to your 10th marketing campaign might not produce much of a return on investment this is because you need to use these basically campaigns to get the data to see what's going to work and what's not going to work so you can refine the process and start targeting your audience that's going to buy from your website and honestly as i mentioned in the marketing section even the guys who promote this thing it's really easy messed up to start with we all did it's part and parcel of the learning process of running a business so patience is key it's gonna take time it's gonna be frustrating it's gonna feel like you're in no man's land for a while but if you stick at it you continue to learn you continue to develop and you continue to work on your business you should start seeing results so just be patient and be prepared to put in the time and effort now before you click off the video i just have a couple of quick requests for you now firstly if you've got these points in the video thank you so much for watching i do appreciate it massively secondly if you've enjoyed this video please hit that like button because it does help the channel out massively also if you'd like to support the channel you can do by simply clicking that subscribe button below but if you really would like to support the channel you can do so by buying me a coffee using the link in the description below and that is very very much appreciated so thank you so much for watching you are all awesome and make sure you stay awesome and i'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 2,003

Keywords: why ecommerce businesses fail, why ecommerce fails, ecommerce failure, ecommerce business tips, ecommerce business, e commerce

Id: f0kSKDDF7Lg

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020