The Most Common E-Commerce Challenges and Solution

Electronic commerce is taking over physical trade. It’s popular because of its convenience generously offered by modern technologies, but at the same time it causes specific difficulties different from those when running business in a physical shop. 

We have given you e-commerce site migration tips and tips for small online shops with few products. Now we offer tips and solutions which will be useful for E-commerce websites of any scale, because all E-commerce websites have or may have some common challenges which we will cover in this article.

Ecommerce Challenges and Solutions:

Challenge #1: Shopping cart abandonment

Solution: Don’t discourage your visitors with a time-consuming and perplexing buying procedure. Don’t annoy them with more than three clicks. Don’t have your potential customers to do excessive actions they will hate. This will eliminate the reasons why they abandon their carts halfway through completing a purchase. We have also previously listed the reasons why visitors leave online shops without buying.

However, the reason also could be trivial, for example, an internet connection interruption or an external distraction, like a phone call or door bell. So you can connect with those people in real time and engage them with targeted messaging. Send a reminder letter via e-mail with images of their chosen items and links directing them back to your product page. Including a sense of urgency in the email will prompt them to quickly make the purchase.

Challenge #2: Unpreparedness for hacker attacks

Solution: Check regularly for your site and server vulnerabilities, get rid of malware and fix bugs. You can ask IT-specialists to do a security audit or use modules to check and improve Drupal site’s security. Protect your customers and yourself by frequently changing your passwords, database location and so on. Maintain customer loyalty and don’t risk having your client’s credit card and personal information compromised.

Challenge #3: Negative mobile user experience

Solution: Make your website welcoming and mobile-friendly. Haven’t implemented a responsive web design or at least AMP yet? Hurry up! Provide convenient content displaying and through-site navigation for your mobile shoppers, whose quantity has recently grown. Don’t disappoint those users who are used to doing online shopping when sitting in a cafe and listening to buying advice from a friend, during a boring journey in public transport, or in other situations when there is no desktop computer. Don’t risk cutting yourself off from lots of potential customers with smartphones and don’t let them go to your competitors who have already optimized their websites for mobile devices.

Challenge #4: Poor or no content marketing

Solution: Provide your customers with valuable content they will always be interested in. Capture them with articles and social media posts that inform them about season trends and novelties, how-to’s and tutorials that teach, lookbooks and product image galleries that showcase, buying guides and FAQs that answer and explain, reviews and testimonials that convince, polls and surveys that respect customer opinions, and other content types that convert them into paying customers. As long as content is king, do content-driven commerce right.

Pay special attention to visual content, because it’s the most catchy type of information and because it’s impossible to sell products without showing what they look like. So use pleasant, high quality photos and don’t forget about ALT text. Write relevant descriptions with keywords as alt attributes to images. This will improve your online store visibility to search engines and your click through rate (CTR) as well, because many users do an image search and then click on products’ images they like, which leads them to a website.

Challenge #5: Inconvenient E-Commerce site search

Solution: Besides search engine optimization, take care of your onsite search. Try to avoid a “no result is found” response. You should especially try to prevent situations when a searched product is actually available but couldn’t be found (and, of course, sold) due to inaccuracies in users’ queries, such as the use of synonyms, dialect or jargon words, abbreviations or simple misspellings. What you need in order to build an effective search box is to implement autocomplete and filters, make the line long enough and place the box high on every page. If there is no exact match, suggest related products with similar functions.

The above Ecommerce Challenges and Solutions can help you improve your e-com website, increase your conversions and keep up with the competition in the online marketplace. Our team is always ready to help you tackle your ecommerce site-related issues.