Common Ecommerce Pitfalls (Ecommerce Fulfilment Guide)

This page is part of our Resources section. The aim of this section is to provide useful information to support clients interested in our ecommerce order fulfilment services.

Introduction 

Despite the rapid growth in the use of e-commerce by both consumers and businesses, not all e-commerce developments are a success. The reasons for this vary and are often dependent upon a particular set of circumstances or issues. Nevertheless there is some commonality between many of the problems and pitfalls experienced by e-commerce systems.

This guide will give an overview of some of the more common e-commerce pitfalls. It obviously cannot cover all potential problem areas, but it will provide you with some useful pointers in terms of what not to do, and things to take account of, as you develop your own e-commerce offerings.

Common e-commerce pitfalls

Lack of planning

Mistakes at the planning stage of an e-commerce project can mean lower chances of success. Here are some of the key issues you need to consider from the outset when planning for the introduction of an e-commerce system.

Set realistic targets

• Set clear goals - for example, to bring in new business or cut the cost of each sale.
• Agree specific, measurable objectives for what you want to achieve, such as a percentage increase in sales or new customers.
• Ensure that any targets you set are realistic and achievable.

Have a clear business focus

• Pursue possibilities offered by e-commerce, but don't lose your focus on what your business is actually about.
• Understand how e-commerce will integrate with your overall business objectives. Will it increase sales or improve margins? Have a clear view on where it will add value.
• If you find that e-commerce is creating conflicts within your operation, re-examine your goals and rethink how e-commerce can best fit into your business.

Don't overlook the hidden costs

• Don't just add up the costs of hardware, software, and hosting services. Look at the total cost of ownership, including training, services, maintenance and support, upgrades, marketing and communications, and administration.
• Understand the effect of increased sales - how are you going to process and dispatch orders? Will you have the capacity if sales take off?
• Understand the issues around postage and shipping costs - identify the geographical locations you will ship to and where you won't. Have a clear pricing policy for shipping - 'Free postage' is great, but only to certain locations.
• Be realistic about the likely costs from the start and ensure that you keep your budget under control.

Consider the site specification

• Draw up a site specification that clearly identifies what you are trying to achieve and how the various components of the site will contribute to this.
• Build reliability and scalability into the solution from the start to ensure that your site can grow in line with your business.
• Make sure your website is straight-forward to update so you can add content quickly and easily, for example to advertise new products or special offers.
• Don't view your e-commerce solution in isolation. Ensure that you take account of the need to integrate it with your main corporate systems and overall IT strategy.

Design and usability concerns

One of the key factors of the success of your e-commerce site will be how easy or difficult customers find it to use. So make sure that you consider these important issues.

Don't over-design the site

• Aim to create a common theme of colours, fonts, graphics and page layouts. This can be achieved without the need for spectacular graphics.
• Keep the screen uncluttered - make good use of space. Ensure your web designer only uses effects that will add value for the user.

Consider download speeds

• Download times are key - users expect pages to load in less than five seconds. If your site is running slowly you may have to upgrade it.
• Remove large images, graphics or animation from key pages like the homepage, if download speeds are slow.

Support multiple browsers

• Design web pages that can be displayed by different browsers. The more common browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.
• Test your web pages in as many browsers as possible during the development process to ensure that they will display properly.

Don't underestimate the importance of usability

• Ensure that navigation buttons are clearly presented and the words or images behind these links are clear, concise and relevant to the information they are leading to.
• Include a site map and a search facility to help the user locate the required information.
• Take account of the 'three-click rule' that enables users starting at your home page to get to the information they require in three mouse clicks.

Get feedback on usability

Many e-commerce operators don't get usability feedback from anyone beyond those on their development team, who are often too close to the process and biased toward the chosen design and infrastructure. Consider getting some sort of outside perspective - employees not involved in the design, a focus group, or your spouses or friends. This can be crucial to the site's development and performance.

Ensure that you get feedback before the full launch of the site. Once it is launched any problems will be highly visible to both your customers and competitors.

Content problems

First impressions are important. The quality of the content on your site can help create an immediate impression and also ensure that customers keep returning.

Ensure information is accurate

• Your customers will be put off by out-of-date or incorrect information.
• Make sure you provide accurate information, especially when it comes to prices, and monitor the information you provide on a regular basis.
• Make sure that all images on your site are accurate and show products in their best light.
• Your contact details, including phone numbers, email and postal addresses, or a prominent link to them, should be on the home page of the site.

Make the content easy to read

• Ensure text is easy to read - web users rarely read whole pages, so write more simply than you would in printed publications.
• Break text up with headings and bullet points. Remember also that English is a second language for millions of potential customers.
• Provide users with a clear description of the product. Ensure they have enough information to make an informed decision.

Keep content fresh and interesting

• People expect sites on the web to be constantly changing. If the content of your website remains static, there is little incentive for users to revisit it and any opportunity to promote new products or services may be lost. Think about how you can engage with your customers using new technology. See our guide: Web 2.0: a guide for business.
• Keep the content as up to date as possible. If you have a news section or announcements about new products then they should reflect the current situation. New content will also help your website perform well in the natural listings of search engines. See our guide on search engine optimisation.
• Remember to change the notice on your website stating when the site was last updated.
• Ask your web designer to incorporate a tool that will recognise newly added products and most popular products, and display them automatically on your homepage.

Check the links on your site

• Regularly check internal links on your site. If they don't work, or a page has been removed, it reflects very poorly on your site.
• Users like links to other sites, so you should consider providing them. However, if there are too many links, or they appear too soon, you risk sending customers away from your website.

Marketing considerations

Marketing is all about promoting your goods and services and trying to sell them. You need to draw the attention of potential customers to your products and services in order to convince them to purchase and to turn first-time purchasers into repeat purchasers.

No matter how good your site is, if people don't know about it they will not visit it. So, you need to consider various marketing strategies.

Develop a marketing plan

• Whether it is advertising on the web, direct mail or other forms of offline promotion, if you want to attract new and existing customers to your site you must have a solid marketing plan. See our guide on how to develop an e-marketing plan.
• Give people a reason to return to your site, such as news, product launches or promotions.
• Your marketing plan should identify the target markets you plan to address and profile each target group so that you can pitch your costs and benefits at the correct level.
• Make sure that your marketing budget is realistic and is capable of funding all of the activities you plan to undertake.
• Equally, the cost of your plan should be justified by the levels of sales you expect to generate.

Use the most appropriate marketing techniques

• There are various online and offline marketing techniques you can use - select the most appropriate ones for your particular needs.
• Ensure that the marketing approach you use does not annoy or antagonise the customer - excessive spam following on from a purchase is a common complaint among e-commerce shoppers. See our guide on how to generate business from your e-marketing plan.

Measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts

• You must measure the success, or otherwise, of any marketing initiative you undertake. This can help show what works well and where resources have been wasted.
• Use tracking and site analysis tools that can help to tell you more about your site visitors - where they came from, what they did while they were on your site (for example whether they purchased anything and what keywords they used to locate products), and where they went when they left.

Shopping cart problems

Your checkout procedure must be as quick and simple as possible, since industry research shows that 60 to 75 per cent of shopping carts are actually abandoned because of slow or unclear checkout processes. Here are some of the techniques that you can employ.

Ensure there are no surprises

• Provide details of delivery costs early in the process, so customers are not surprised during final checkout.
• Show stock availability on the product page, so that customers do not have to wait until checkout to find out that a product is actually out of stock.
• Include some text about the buying process, explaining how long it will take and how many stages there are.

Make it easy to select and amend orders

• When an item is placed in the shopping cart, include a link back to the product page, so customers can easily jump back to make sure they have selected the right item.
• Make it straightforward to change quantities or delete an item from the shopping cart.
• If a product comes in multiple sizes or colours, make it easy for the customer to select or change values in the shopping cart.

Indicate customer progress

• Ensure that the customer always knows at exactly what stage they are in the checkout process by including an indicator, for example 'You are in step 3 of 4'.
• Make sure that customers don't get lost by including a prominent 'Next Step' or 'Continue with Checkout' navigation button on each checkout page.

Show clear information

• Keep all information on a single screen on each checkout page, so customers do not have to frequently scroll down.
• If the billing information is the same as the shipping information, include a box that customers can tick to automatically fill in the same information.
• If information is missing or filled out incorrectly during checkout, make sure that a meaningful error message is displayed that clearly describes what needs to be corrected.

Order fulfilment issues

Recent research indicates that a large proportion of the complaints made by e-commerce customers relate to fulfilment issues. In order to tackle such problems you need to address various issues.

Product delivery problems

• Late delivery of products is a frequently cited complaint, so e-commerce providers must be realistic about the delivery promises they make to customers, especially when demand is high.
• Increasingly, the delivery of products purchased via e-commerce sites is contracted out to third-party distribution services. The importance attached to on-time delivery by customers means that you must select your outsourced service very carefully.
• Some e-commerce providers believe that they can lure customers by offering a product at low cost, whilst charging a relatively high delivery rate. This practice rarely works and is more likely to cause problems in customer relations.
• Depending upon the nature of the product you are supplying, you need to ensure that your packaging is robust enough to ensure safe delivery.

Failing to keep the customer updated on progress

• Successful e-commerce sites make a point of confirming orders immediately by email. Customers are entitled to written confirmation of their order under the Distance Selling Regulations 2000. They can be generated automatically via email and are expected by most customers. See our guide on e-commerce and the law.
• The customer should be provided with a way to track down the progress and availability of their order. Many carriers now use email to notify a customer that an order has been dispatched, whilst others have implemented online tracking systems that enable the customer to log on to their website in order to check on progress.

Having an acceptable returns policy

• You should aim to put in place an acceptable means of handling customer returns and ensuring that any customer dissatisfaction is professionally resolved.
• This is commonly achieved by giving a 100 per cent no-quibble money-back guarantee if they don't like or want the product.

Security weaknesses

Regardless of the size of your business, you should put in place measures to protect your data against people attempting to steal or hacking into your systems. There are a variety of ways in which misuse of information and hacker attacks could jeopardise your business, so security must be at the forefront of your e-commerce plans.

The threats posed by the lack of adequate security measures range from losing the confidence of your customers to the non-availability of your e-commerce site.

If you already have a merchant account set up with your bank, secure socket layer (SSL) technology is used to encrypt transaction data and to send the necessary customer and card details to the acquiring bank in order for purchases to be authorised. You should, therefore, ensure that any web hosting solution you are considering is capable of supporting the SSL protocol.

Hackers gaining access to privileged information

• Inadequate security controls can enable hackers to gain access to your sensitive business data such as price lists, catalogues and valuable intellectual property. The motives may be malicious or to gain competitive knowledge.
• Hackers may also gain access to the financial information of your business or your customers, with a view to committing fraud.

Loss of customer confidence

• Security breaches can damage the confidence that your customers have in the e-commerce service you provide.
• A lack of customer confidence is potentially fatal to the success of your online venture.

Denial-of-service attacks

• Denial-of-service attacks deny access to authorised users of a website, so that the site is forced to offer a reduced level of service or cease operation completely. Some businesses never recover from such attacks.

No contingency measures in place

• There are many possible threats to the operation of your e-commerce system, both malicious and natural. Consider the most likely risks and take steps to minimise them, such as virus software, password protection and firewalls.
• Contingency planning is intended to put measures in place to enable your systems to continue operating, perhaps through locating to a back-up site.
• Some e-commerce providers have no such contingency plans in place - you need to consider how your own systems would continue to operate in such circumstances and the likely effect that this would have on your business.