As an ecommerce owner, you might be thinking that things are more of a struggle than you have ever imagined. You’ll run into hard times, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t thrive the market, and turn out to be an ecommerce champion.
Let’s look at some of the hardest challenges faced by ecommerce organizations of all sizes and the ways in which you can win the race.
Finding the correct products to sell
Product selection has always been quite a struggle. Earlier, opening an online store was costlier as compared to today, and the ecommerce journey was tiresome.
Ecommerce platforms like Builderfly have solved many barriers of getting into the ecommerce market. Today, anyone can launch their online store within a few minutes and start selling their products. But, the selection of the products that you want to sell on your store is really a tricky deal.
Solution: Ecommerce giant Amazon is now controlling the ecommerce world with its fulfillment services, which empowers vendors to explore the market. Leveraging Amazon’s B2B services, you can check and select the products available across the world. You can get free quotations as well as can place bulk orders for your retail business without traveling to places. Aliexpress has also improved product sourcing by providing access to Chinese manufacturers.
Exploiting these modish resources, you can connect with the businesses to source amazing products. You can also choose to open your manufacturing unit to design unique products.
Finding the right market
The righteousness of the market entirely depends upon your buyer persona. If you haven’t decided your ideal customer, then you need to determine what your target market is and running Facebook ads to this audience.
Solution: When you make your first sale, try to analyze and understand everything you can about what brought you this sale and how did your audience found it. Once you have product-market fit decided, then you can figure out the best possible way to reach out to your audience. Don’t rely on a single sales channel to market your products; instead, the best way is to experiment. None of the sales channels is bad in a way; it entirely depends upon your marketing strategy as well as grip on the ecommerce platform. But, keep exploring the options and let your conversion rate define the next strategies.
Competition
Competition comes in many different ways for small ecommerce businesses. You have to keep up with competitive pricing and service.
Solution: Ecommerce market is growing rapidly, and thus it is turned difficult for businesses to stand out in the market. By giving an attractive look to your site and maintaining uniqueness for your business, you can stay competitive. Optimize your site from the perspective of SEO, so you can improve the rate of market penetration. By providing unique value, you can focus more on smaller demographics, which makes it easier for you to boost your domain authority.
Delivering an Omni-channel customer experience
In today’s world, customers can reach out through many touch-points. They can visit your website, contact your support team, leave a message, or simply follow you on social media. All they want is the timely response from your business, whenever the query is made. If you don’t hear your customers, they will surely leave and choose another business over you.
Solution: Make sure you’re well equipped with the right technology. The latest visual engagement tools can help you in offering better customer experience across all the platforms. You need to identify the primary channels that your customers are using to connect with you. Analyze which channel is the most important to your customers and optimize those channels by adding personalized messages. This way, you can build create a better bond with your target customers.
Attracting the ideal client
Online shoppers don’t shop directly nowadays. They use different ecommerce websites to look for the product they need. They see the recommendations and reviews on social media.
Solutions: Over the years, many things have changed, including how shoppers devour content and communicate online. By taking advantage of social media and other marketing tools, retailers can find out their targeted audience. Further, you can create marketing campaigns within your budget, to draw the attention of your ideal customers based on the buyer person without actually waiting for people to discover you.
Data Security
Of all the ecommerce business challenges today, technical issues in ecommerce can be one of the hardest to survive. Also, if those technical issues are identified with data security, it very well may be a bad dream. Attackers can corrupt your site with viruses. However, they can likewise uncover secret information.
Recall that massive Facebook security breach? The attack uncovered individual data of roughly 50 million clients. Programmers attempted to get private client data like names and locations.
Solution: SSL certification is the basic security measure that you must add to your site. Additionally, you can look for firewalls and other safety software. Don’t forget to take the backup of your ecommerce site. This can help you recover your store, even in case of a giant hacker attack.
Catching quality leads
Online retail businesses are spending a lot of money driving traffic to their online stores. But, the traffic doesn’t evaluate the rate of conversion. With conversion rates going between 1% to 3%, they need to place a ton of effort in producing leads in request to take advantage of their marketing efforts.
The money is in the rundown. Building an email subscriber list is key for long term achievement. Not exclusively will assist you with conveying your message, yet it will likewise enable you to prospect better-using devices, for example, Facebook Custom Audiences.
Solution: You need to understand that all of your prospect customers are not alike — the interest of customer chances as per their choice. Thus, a similar approach may not please everyone. With the assistance of marketers, you must craft the right message for a variety of demographics in your target audience. This personalization must be made considering yourself as the end customer. This can help you getting quality leads for your business.
Maintaining customer loyalty
Without customer trust and loyalty, even the best looking websites are bound to struggle. Generating new customers, and maintaining them requires a lot of effort. One of the main challenges faced by ecommerce companies is building customer trust and loyalty as a seller and buyer don’t know each other. Hence, customers preferred to rely on face-to-face transactions. You should make sure that your customer is satisfied with the whole process you’ve set up so far, from ordering online products to shipping.
Solution: Many retailers sell similar products, so you must identify competitive advantage and nurture your customers in the best possible way.
You can flourish your bond of trust by:
- Displaying your complete address details, team photo, customer testimonials, badges on your store.
- Adding an option of live chat support.
- Create meaningful blogs as they build trust.
- Create some interesting loyalty programs and invite shoppers to join them.
Product Return and Refund Policies
As per ComScore, more than 60% of online shoppers say that they look at a retailer’s return policy before making a purchase. Furthermore, 2 out of 5 clients said they abandoned shopping carts in light of delivery days and refund policies.
Solution: Having a good product return/refund policy could make a big difference to your store’s success and failure. Be transparent and create an easy and fast return policy. Do not make it strict, so customers need not go through hassles. For a better idea, you can refer to product return and refund policies of known ecommerce sites or you might be already aware of these if you sell products on Flipkart, Amazon, etc.
Achieving productive long term growth
The growth of your business is measured in terms of sales, but what is more important is to gain trust. Within a small time span of a few months, you can’t judge ecommerce.
Online retailers must find out new approaches to decrease stock expenses, reduce overhead, decrease shipping expenses, and improve promotion.
Inventory Management
Another big challenge faced by many ecommerce store owners is the overall inventory management. What happens when the holiday season comes, and you’re running out of stock?
How will you respond to customer’s orders?
Solution: The key to inventory management is to stay organized. You should maintain a detailed report of every single day to understand where your inventory stands. You may require to maintain out of stock and a product ID system to have a real-time view of your shelves. With the RFID tagging, you can live track your inventory and keep a healthy stock ready before you hit the season.
Competitor Analysis
In the excessively competitive ecommerce business world, numerous rivals are offering similar products and services. Unless you have an effective strategy to differentiate yourself, it is very tough to survive.
So how can you stay ahead?
Solution: Do perform a thorough research of your local and national competitors. Build a strategy that can help you shine brighter than your competitors. Find out which products are more in demand and remove outdated items. Offer unique client assistance to separate your business.
Price and Shipping
Giant online retailers like Amazon can offers products at a comparative cost yet offer free delivery because they have the assets to do as such. They have shipping warehouses situated far and wide, and transport orders from the closest office.
As a little online business, how might you defeat this issue?
Solution: Get inventive and look past big-name carriers. Investigate utilizing a nearby delivery or courier organization that will deliver the product rapidly to your clients at a focused rate. Winning against ecommerce giants is impossible, but you can maintain the order charges, by minimizing profit score in your initial business days.
Hiring the right people
When starting a new store, usually one person takes care of selecting the product, catalog, inventory management, marketing & promotion, etc. This can be handled when the sales volume is low, but as you grow your business and increase sales value, then it is required to recruit new people into the team.
Solutions: Retailers ought to be out there getting their name out inside the online network by attending ecommerce gatherings, talking at occasions, and networking. Having a feeling of purpose is vital. This can help you understand the utility of hiring the personnel and thus makes it easier for you to hire resources for your e-store.
Wrapping up
Ecommerce is growing at a scorching pace, and a lot of ecommerce websites enter into the market daily with a survival rate of less than 10% after the first year. This industry is tough and demands businesses to arm themselves with state-of-the-art solutions that can help them stay unique.
