5 mistakes you should avoid about your online store

Testing and using complex marketing strategies surely is a winning move, but you also need to try not to render it all pointless because of a few mistakes.

Bringing non-buying customers to your store is just as useful as pouring water into a broken bathtub… and this might happen often, because of small details we might have not considered.

Back to our bathtub, if you see a huge hole in its side, you understand it’s its fault if water keeps leaking onto the floor. While if its entire surface shows a thousand small cracks, the bathtub will leak water and you wouldn’t even notice it.

And that’s why I’m writing this article: to fix any crack your online store could possibly have.

Let’s check out the top 5 essential aspects of online marketing managers often forget about, and how to add them to your store.

1) Offer a wishlist option!

We might think that offering customers the chance of creating a wishlist is not an important feature.

Many websites don’t offer this option, so why should your online store? Well:

It increases sales – It’s shown that allowing customers to save the items they are interested in will increase the conversion rate on your store.
It increases the average sale value – Seeing other items they are interested in while buying, will work as an incentive for customers to make multiple purchases.
It keeps your customers loyal – If customers have a personal wishlist on your store, they will keep coming back to it to update it and buy more products.
It spreads the word about your store – Each time customers share their wishlist on a social network, friends and family will see it and it will create more potential customers.

Tip:How can you implement a wishlist option to your e-commerce store then? All you need is the Wishlist plugin.

2) It makes the checkout process much easier

Once you have convinced customers to shop at your store, you have to make sure you don’t lose them before the finishing line.

You might not be particularly happy to know that 68% of potential customers drops out of transaction before concluding them.

There are a number of causes behind this, half of them drop out because they find it difficult to navigate your website or to go through the checkout process.

Seeing one of those pages in which you have to enter a lot of personal data without knowing where to start could make anybody feel lost, and that often leads potential buyers to give up on their transaction.

Keep this in mind: the average customer is lazy: help them not get tired.

That’s why dividing your checkout process into multiple steps could be a winning strategy, in order for your client to go through them one at a time without feeling lost and give up.

Tip: To quickly ease up the checkout process we can use the MultiStep Checkout plugin, which will allow you to automatiacally divide the checkout process by simply activating it and also giving you the chance to assign a number or symbol to each step.

This way you can hold your customer’s hand until the end.

3) Show your Terms and condition and Privacy Policy

The internet is a dangerous and treacherous place. At least parts of it are.

That’s why your potential customers have grown naturally skeptic and they don’t just trust anybody, which is something that could prove damaging to your business

It’s your duty as a salesman to earn your customers’ trust.

A quick and painless way to do this is publicly display a public link to your Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy pages, in order to achieve two things:

Reassurecustomers
Legally protect yourself

I suggest you make it as easy as you can for your customers to find and go through your Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions of the transactions from your store. In many countries it is mandatory to have customers accept both the Privacy Polixy and the Terms and Conditions provided buy the store during the checkout process.

Tip: An easy way to do so is by using the Terms And Conditions Popup plugin, which enables a popup window to come up and show your customers a link to both pages without stepping out of the checkout process, since they will appear as an external window allowing customers to go through them without leaving the page they are browsing.

Keep this in mind: mutual trust between sellers and consumers is essential for business.

4) Offer discounts!

There’s one thing both a showcase of a real store and the one of an online store have in common: the first thing a customer will look for in it are discounted items.

Nothing feels more reassuring and tempting than seeing “ x% discount” on something, since customers, especially online ones, look for two things in particular: comfort and convenience.

Setting a discount rate on your items shows you are willing to offer something more than your competitors and consequently, if you don’t, you are pretty much telling your customers the opposite.

In order for you to understand the full potential of deals and offers, let me tell you that some companies show they Increased views by 148% on products with discounts.

But I can understand your doubts: offering discounts may sometimes prove to be counterproductive since it will reduce your income.

I suggest you offer selected specific deals, so that customers will be encouraged to buy from you and you won’t reduce your income too much.

For instance offering discounts and offers to those who perform multiple purchase will greatly increase the average transaction value on your store.

Tip: To achieve this the best way, I suggest you use the Dynamic Pricing plugin which allows you to create custom deals based on a specific amount of items in cart or a set total price.

Doing this will grant you three specific results:

Increased purchases among customers looking for deals.
Increased average transaction value.
Satisfied customers that are more likely to visit your store again.

5) Exploit Cross Selling!

To further improve the average transaction value on your store, you should also consider using the Cross Selling and Upselling strategies.

You might have heard of these, but what exactly are they?

The Cross Selling strategy is based on showing customers more products that are similar to the ones they are looking at, as an incentive to buy more products of the same value at the same time.

An example could be a videoame page which also displays gaming peripherals such as keyboard and mouse, controllers or headsets.

Upselling means encouraging customers to buy a higher quality and more expensive product than the one they are looking at.

For instance, one customers is looking at an average quality computer screen and the store will display a higher quality one as an incentive for them to buy it.

Both systems will increase the average purchase value on your store, I suggest you use cross selling in particular, since it’s easier to get started on that one on a limited budget.

Tip: I suggest you use the Frequently Bought Together plugin to implement this function to your store, it will allow your customers to see related items as other products they might be interested in.

As a psychological strategy, by seeing the total price of three items, customers will think they are saving money, even if they are paying the same price as if they were buying them individually.

In conclusion

Here is a small piece of advice for you before finishing: rather than looking for a miracle strategy to bring customers to your store, focus on small details that, put together, might just bring you the same result.

Simply by using these little tweaks, you’ve climbed up 5 important steps on the stairway to success.