Despite a crumbling economy since 2008, a great many entrepreneurs have been finding their fortune on the internet. Ecommerce is a continually growing industry, and whether you sell products online or provide a valuable service, your website is your online store. If your store doesn’t work properly, then you lose profits.
Did you have a professional web designer build your website? What could possibly go wrong? You may be surprised! Here are three important mistakes on an ecommerce website you should avoid.
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Browser Incompatibility
Whether you program your ecommerce site yourself or hire a professional, be sure that the finished product works with a wide variety of browsers. Just because you have tested your site on MS Explorer doesn’t mean it will work on Apple’s Safari browser, Firefox, or other popular browsers.
Though Explorer still has the largest market share on the browser scale, there are plenty others that are gaining in popularity like Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, or even the new Google Chrome. Test your ecommerce site to assure that users of these browsers can still be your customers.
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Heavy Pages
Many small business online entrepreneurs think that a website with all the bells, whistles, flashes, and animation is the way to go. However, a flashy ecommerce website could be working against you.
All that dynamic content, like Flash animation, scrolling content, ads, etc., can slow down your site and turn potential customers away. In many cases, this type of content is pulled from different application web servers and databases, which could bring your page loads to a crawling pace.
A little ‘bling’ may not be bad. However, simple, flowing, easy to navigate designs have been proven to work through the ages.
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Missing Feedback Opportunities
Just because it works doesn’t mean it cannot work better. Whether you make a sale or not, you should ask your ecommerce customers how they think you could improve. Ask specifically about usability, ease of navigation, design, and even the buying process. Without getting this kind of feedback, you are missing a valuable opportunity to improve your processes, as well as your profits.
