Selling online is easy – right?

The simple answer is yes, relatively speaking – to an experienced website design and development company, it is no harder to build an e-commerce website than a brochure website.

The basics of brand recognition, design, customer journey and simplicity of use are all the same, with the addition of bringing the design decisions across to the product pages.

Sometimes, the most time-consuming part is simply uploading the product information, and if you are new to selling online, you are unlikely to have a nice, ready-to-upload file of products with accompanying images. But even this, with a little help can be broken down into stages and simplified.

It seems that businesses both large and small suffer from the same issues, and it is only those larger companies that can afford vast marketing budgets, to constantly bring in new customers as they lose current customers, who never seem to address the problems. The reasons that customers move away from using a particular e-commerce website can be broken down, largely, into the following experiences. Check through this list and certainly most, if not all of us, have suffered at least one of these problems.

Quality – Products or Services not matching the description, or worse from a reputation point of view, expectations.

Delivery problems – The delivery too much longer than expected, the product was damaged, or was lost somewhere in transit.

Payment problems – Not going through for no explained reason, charging twice or being the subject of a fraudulent payment.

Additional charges – Only at the very end of the purchase journey are you informed about additional shipping fees, or VAT being added.

Unclear returns policy – Having to hunt the website for the returns procedure and not being clear on what kind of warranty you have from them.

Lack of trust – Your customers may not trust you or your store with their personal or financial information if your website looks badly designed, amateurish, and tries to hide information such as telephone numbers and office addresses.

Limited payment choice – Do you keep up to date with the current payment gateways, to give your customer the option to pay with their preferred method, such as credit card, debit card, PayPal, Google pay, Apple pay…..

From this list we, as small business owners, can put together our own how-not-to-do selling online list, and with the help of a good website development company, can address and eradicate many of these reputation-damaging issues – or do you want to keep throwing money you do not have at constantly marketing to replace customers?

Creatively Yours Ltd helps businesses like yours succeed online through website design, website development, and our Helponomics system, which offers support and training as you need it and highlights areas that could increase your sales.

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Then why not drop us a line to helping@creatively-yours.co.uk, or simply call us on 01536 23 98 98 or 01493 718 300