In the early days of ecommerce, there were fewer online retailers, which meant you were more likely to make a good amount of money selling your products.
According to Statista, there are now about 2.14 billion online shoppers. The competition is fierce, and several crucial ecommerce challenges have emerged in the process.
Keep reading to overcome the following problems:
1. Security
2. Personalization and User Experience
3. Sales Sustainability
4. Traffic and Visibility
Retailing Problems
- Security.
- Personalization and user experience.
- Sales sustainability.
- Traffic and visibility.
Several hard aspects of ecommerce pose challenges to online store owners. Above are the four biggest challenges in ecommerce, and here’s how to solve them:
1. Security
Security is a hard aspect of ecommerce that requires critical attention.
Due to the number of transactions that ecommerce stores deal with, online retailers are a potential target for internet fraudsters.
Hackers won’t waste any time taking advantage of ecommerce stores and their unsuspecting customers once they sense a hole in the security system.
A couple of the security gaps that might be in your ecommerce site include:
- An unsecured ecommerce platform: Using an HTTP website instead of HTTPS is one of the biggest challenges in ecommerce.
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It isn’t a serious threat when you’re simply surfing the web. But, the moment an HTTP website asks for sensitive information like your potential customers’ credit card details, it becomes a big security issue.
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP that uses an encryption protocol called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which makes it harder for cyber attackers to access your website.
- Poor payment gateways: This is a common ecommerce challenge as poor payment gateways lead to lower sales, less trust, and a worse customer experience.
The amount of money and customers you might lose from using a mediocre website builder and payment setup is far greater than the price of a high-quality website builder.
Your website security is a top priority. Every Nexcess cloud hosting package guarantees website protection against cyber attacks, including DDoS, XSS, and brute force. And all of our websites come with Solid Security Pro.
We also offer SSL certificates to ensure your website is safe and secure.
2. Personalization and User Experience
Personalization is one of the biggest challenges in ecommerce. In fact, due to online retailer giants like Amazon’s influence, 80% of shoppers want personalized digital experiences from ecommerce stores.
You will establish trust-based relationships with your audience and make more sales if you show them that you care about their experience on your ecommerce website.
9 Ecommerce Optimization Tips for Fast & Effective Sites >>
To solve this ecommerce challenge, start by dealing with the following points to create a personalized experience for them:
- Mediocre website hosting: Website hosting is one of the vital elements of successful ecommerce websites.
Partner with a web hosting company that offers website maintenance and cybersecurity services. This ensures your website is secure and your online store runs smoothly.
- Poor user experience: Mobile takes up about 50% of the world’s website traffic. Mobile optimization for your online store is important, although a hard aspect of ecommerce businesses.
Furthermore, 404 error pages and bad page transitions can put off customers from visiting your ecommerce store.
- Using starter templates: Several ecommerce stores use starter templates that make their online stores look the same as others.
But the truth remains that basic templates aren’t original. Your ecommerce site won’t get as much love, attraction, and sales as a custom-designed online store will.
While many online stores look basic and don’t offer a unique, industry-specific experience, Nexcess’s StoreBuilder offers you full functionality to build a custom-designed ecommerce store and streamline your online business’s workflow through automation.
With Nexcess’s Cloud Accelerator, your website will be faster and put an end to slow ecommerce page speeds.
3. Sales Sustainability
Ecommerce sales sustainability is a hard aspect of ecommerce and for many other forms of business.
After setting up your custom-designed ecommerce website, your next goal should be making online sales consistently.
While making sales requires a proper business plan and marketing strategy, certain website issues cause this ecommerce challenge. These include:
- Poor website layout: Your website layout should be simple, organized, and easy to navigate for online shopping. This way, when your promotions bring visitors to your online store, they won’t bounce the moment they reach your landing page.
New customers need to take a look around your store, like your product, and likely see proof of credibility before making their first order.
- Disorganized product page: Make your product catalog eye candy. You don’t want to reduce your conversion rates because of a messy product page.
Arrange your store and make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.
- Complex checkout systems: Keep your buying process simple and make it as easy as possible for customers to pay you.
Anything that breeds confusion or complexity can lead to shopping cart abandonment. It’s also a good ecommerce practice to add a refund policy to your online store for sales transparency.
With Nexcess’s PCI Compliant Hosting, you can secure your store for processing credit card payments.
While the average cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%, Nexcess’s StoreBuilder provides a cart abandonment solution to boost sales and revenue.
4. Traffic and Visibility
With so many ecommerce companies available, traffic and visibility are hard aspects of ecommerce several online store owners are still trying to decipher.
Gaining visibility and the right traffic to your online store will do a lot for you as an ecommerce business owner. But certain factors might stand in the way. These are:
- Wrong setup due to zero guidance: Setting up an ecommerce website is simple, but only if you know how to do it right. When done incorrectly, you can lose visibility and traffic from search engines.
10 Ways to Attract New Customers To Your eCommerce Store >>
You should invest in good SEO techniques and a hosting company that provides 24/7 support and expert guidance for setting up and maintaining your online store.
- Website crashes due to unreliable web host: Poor web hosting is an ecommerce challenge that will affect personalization, traffic, and sales.
A mediocre host can cause slow loading pages, server glitches, and website crashes when your online store gets a high amount of traffic, which will ultimately cause you to lose potential customers.
Nexcess provides Fully Managed Magento Hosting, a complete retail sales package for high-traffic ecommerce websites.
If you want to expand your online store’s traffic capacity, the Nexcess Cloud Auto Scaling add-on will prepare your website for traffic surges and prevent crashes.
Final Thoughts: 4 Biggest Ecommerce Challenges and How To Fix Them
There are several hard aspects of ecommerce that online store owners face when trying to scale their brands.
However, it’s more effective to fix the biggest challenges in ecommerce first to achieve your strategic goals.
Counter the ecommerce challenges above to increase your website traffic, sales, and customer retention.
Ready to run a challenge-free and profitable ecommerce store? Get started with fully hosted WooCommerce from Nexcess.