The Biggest Challenges Of eCommerce To Anticipate When Designing Your Online Store
Anticipating challenges that lie in the future and having a plan for when they happen can be achieved through careful planning.
Industry professionals state that these are the most difficult issues that come with having an online store.
eCommerce Challenge #1: Conversion Rates
For retailers that began with in-person shops, controlling an online store may be a completely distinctive experience, coming with its own distinct difficulties.
The meaning of conversion stays the same; it is the action of buying something whether it be in your physical store or in your e-commerce store. Not everyone who visits your website and looks around will end up making a purchase, just like how it is in your physical store.
Basically, the conversion rate for your e-commerce store is the proportion of visitors to your website that purchase your product.
The challenge for first-time eCommerce retailers? They could be discouraged when they observe their transformation rates as low as ten percent.
The solution:
- Be prepared for conversion rates to be lower than you hoped for: Believe it or not, 3% is the average conversion rate. But it also depends on other factors such as the market you’re selling it in and the products or services you offer.
- Set your eCommerce website up to drive conversion: Key website elements like search engine optimization aimed at your target audience, messaging that builds a strategic conversion funnel, and strong calls-to-action that define the user journey can help improve conversion rates for your website.
eCommerce Challenge #2: Online Identity Verification
Occurrences of fraud take place sporadically in physical retail stores, however, they happen even more frequently in an online storeroom landscape, particularly if the money exchange is not protected.
Buying things with a bogus phone number, address, or stolen payment information can lead to an enormous financial loss.
What steps can you take to ensure your customers pay and avoid any deceptive deals?
The solution:
- Look for signs of suspicious activity: Indications of fraud may include an unusually high volume of orders or zip codes that do not match a state or a city. Always send an automated verification link for customers that sign up and purchase, to validate that the customer is genuine and the purchase is authentic.
- Use secure software solutions: Set up an eCommerce security solution to identify fraudulent attempts by using multi-layered authentication. These programs have features such as SSN verification, identity checks, and instant authentication, making it possible for your eCommerce business to stay ahead of fraudsters.
eCommerce Challenge #3: Consumer Expectations
A recent industry report revealed that customer experience emerged as the most significant factor for customers when making a purchase from a brand in the year 2020.
What does this mean? People paying for goods and services viewed the whole experience with the business as more significant than the amount charged and more imperative than the item itself.
In this highly competitive market, the quality of your product isn’t the only factor that makes a difference. Customers want more.
Amazon, a huge firm in the eCommerce sector, set a new standard for customer expectations with its well-known shipping system.
How is an eCommerce brand to compete?
The solution:
- Integrate an order fulfillment process: A strategic process allows your business to receive and store inventory, process, pick, pack, and ship your orders in a timely and well-structured manner that can result in higher customer satisfaction.
- Consistently evaluate your service: Constantly assess your customer service by reviewing customer complaints and performing customer surveys. Update your processes and policies as needed to ensure you’re meeting customer expectations.
- Establish customer connection: Ensure your customer feels valued and connected to your brand. You can establish this connection by sending personalized emails or text messages with product updates, shipping alerts, birthday messages, and even “We miss you, here’s a discount code” notes to help improve customer retention.
eCommerce Challenge #4: Customer Support
Although it appears that chatbots have become ubiquitous, only about a third of internet customers around the world feel comfortable getting customer care from AI when making purchases online.
Although chatbots can be useful for bringing in new clients and saving money, the personalization that customers get from human service has yet to be replaced by artificial intelligence.
The solution:
- Utilize human touch: According to a study by American Express, 40% of customers prefer talking to a human on the phone for more complex issues such as payment disputes. While offering automated customer service is convenient, customers still prefer to talk to a human agent when complex issues about money are involved, because they want immediate and accurate answers, unlike chatbots which offer a scripted and automated response.
- Gather feedback: Collecting feedback is important whether your customer support is human or robot. You can understand how your customers feel about your support team’s performance when you send out customer satisfaction surveys after they experience support through calls, email, or chat. Surveys will help you collect insights into the areas your support team can improve on. Use these insights to take action and continually improve your customer support.
eCommerce Challenge #5: Cybersecurity Issues
Hackers can put the safety of your eCommerce site in danger by implanting it with viruses, and even more dangerously, can threaten the security of your customers’ confidential details, potentially damaging your company’s prestige and ruining any trust from current and future customers.
This is a very important obstacle to tackle when it comes to eCommerce, and it is a major source of stress for eCommerce managers.
The solution:
- Manage your own servers: Ensure your eCommerce website is hosted on a standalone server dedicated only to you. Sharing the same space on one server with multiple other sites is risky; if some of those websites get hacked, the malware files may infect the entire server – including your store.
- Backup your data regularly: Creating a backup of your entire database and all your files is essential in the eCommerce business. The general rule of thumb is, the bigger the website, the more often the backup should be performed. At Digital Silk, we run daily backups of all the websites we maintain.
- Install security plugins and safety components: These are specially designed to prevent hack attacks. There is a great online market of security plugins for different systems and platforms that include firewalls, two-factor authentications, and more.
- Update your eCommerce platform regularly: Make sure you update your platform regularly with official patches, plugins, and other software developed by its creators. Their teams work actively on identifying current threats and create solutions to stop them in their tracks. (If you’re not sure which eCommerce platform is right for you, check out our Magento vs. WooCommerce article to compare these two popular platforms head to head!)
Technology Solutions That Can Help You Make Data-Driven Decisions
Using a blend of data strategies is a way that merchants can get data that will permit them to make choices that are based on the information and create experiences for customers that will help their business increase.
1. Data warehouses.
A data warehouse is a centralized collection of organized data drawn from various sources. A well-constructed data warehousing system can furnish a business with advantageous information.
Not only can massive companies take advantage of data warehouses to obtain data related to their operations, but smaller businesses can too. Tools for data warehousing can be used by businesses of any size. The idea of a “warehouse” often brings about an image of an actual building; however, there are numerous software technologies available on the cloud that are convenient and perfect for expanding to match your desired size.
2. Business intelligence solutions.
Data warehousing is a part of business intelligence. What distinguishes a data warehouse from a business intelligence solution? Basically, data warehouses are systems that help store data while business intelligence programs help analyze the data and use it to aid data-driven decisions and predictions.
You can use these tools to take the voluminous information you have and create dashboards that can be easily comprehended by your different teams. Here are a few examples of these tools:
- Google Data Studio is a data visualization tool that provides your team with some powerful ways of looking at your data. It has the advantage of being free and tightly integrated with Google BigQuery. Additionally, BigCommerce merchants can take advantage of pre-built reports to get started with Google Data Studio.
- Tableau describes itself as a data visualization software with the goal of helping anyone to understand their data.
- Microsoft Power BI is an industry leader in the business intelligence solutions field. Run by Microsoft, the solution provides interactive data visualizations with easy-to-understand dashboards.
3. Customer data platforms.
Nowadays, people are not limited to just one store to do their shopping; they tend to go to multiple places before they finish buying what they need. They investigate and look into many different websites and applications before deciding. Knowing how a client moves through each channel of communication is where customer data platforms are helpful.
CDPs acquire details to construct comprehensive profiles of customers in order to guide marketing activity. They employ tactics that gather data as customers interact with different points during the process and consolidate the information so that other business intelligence applications have access to it.
By utilizing CDPs, companies can ensure that their teams are aware of who their customers are, and what their buying habits are, and gain an understanding of their behavior. This helps to prevent data from being fragmented and keeps it all in one place. Getting to know your customers and what they need is key to properly marketing to them and finding solutions to their problems.
4. Personalization.
Businesses can employ personalization solutions to switch from a customer marketing tactic focused on reaching many at once to a personalized strategy meant for individual people. You can use personalization solutions to give each customer an exclusive experience with adaptable content, product proposals, reductions, and other incentives. Here are some examples of personalization solutions in the BigCommerce partner ecosystem:
5. Analytics.
Gaining comprehension of how purchasers operate on the internet can give you intense competencies into what is thriving and not on your web-based retail website. Analytics can be broken down to a simple concept: the usage of calculations to examine data in order to evaluate and measure the performance of web use, promotion, searching, and sales.
How BigCommerce Customers are Making Data-Driven Decisions
Examples of how BigCommerce sellers can make use of our Big Open Data Solutions to glean knowledge and form judgments are given here.
1. Origin
Origin, a clothing and food firm that manufactures its items in the hills of Maine, is refining its technical system in order to match increased activity in its channels. The business specifically took advantage of the BigQuery connection and premade Data Studio reports to organize their client data from multiple sources as part of their complete omnichannel program.
By integrating BigCommerce with BigQuery, we could furnish unsoiled, feasible data, instead of relying on manual reporting which is liable to mistakes, so that we could make better determinations for the company. Sid Martin, a Systems Analyst at Origin, has stated that centralized data and pertinent analysis have been immensely beneficial in terms of creating the necessary plans for successful investments.
2. Garrett Wade
For Garrett Wade, a supplier of quality woodworking and gardening hand tools, the combination of BigCommerce and BigQuery has made a substantial difference to the analysis done by the business.
The business was able to utilize BigQuery for consistent, factual information right away. The company indicated that they devoted minimal resources to tidying and standardizing the data. They utilized the data to check the correctness of the testing environment before commencing the launch. The company also took advantage of this opportunity, in order to generate approved reports straight away; resulting in an environment that properly enables the development crew to finish the more complex reports.
The two-person development team at the company can gain immense efficiency and cost savings by understanding how customers act and shop, and then producing detailed reports in Tableau from one spot.
Key Takeaway
We know that data has power. Consumers expect an increasingly tailored experience with their ecommerce shopping and are utilizing an expanding range of sources, leading to an amplified need to amass and evaluate the data collected.
Having a web commerce system that backs your information and the analytics-based plan is going to be indispensable. We strongly believe that software as a service (SaaS) is the wave of the future and that data plays an important role in this. Having the capacity to select the most suitable data solutions, from data warehousing to analysis, that will propel your business intelligence aims and ensure that they are able to work in sync with each other efficiently will make a considerable impact in refining an efficient data strategy.
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