5 Stupid Mistakes Most People Make When Starting an Ecommerce Store
Online shops seem to be springing up like mushrooms. But just as quickly as they appear, they die out just as fast. And it's a pity that so many people start their e-commerce shops with so much enthusiasm, but once faced with problems, fall back.
Here are five stupid mistakes most people make when starting e-commerce shops that you have to avoid.
1. Poor Product Selection
While more than half of consumers prefer shopping online, it doesn't automatically mean that they will want to buy your particular product. The products you choose must have nothing to do with you, your hobbies, passions, interests, or likes. They must be something that people want to buy. Of course, you're lucky if you are passionate about something people want to buy, but most of the time, your interests will not coincide with what people need.
You can find popular products by doing basic product research. You will be surprised by some things people are willing to pay for. What you must do is check what your competitors are currently selling and what are their best-selling products. There are many free tools available online that can help you do this, but you can do it manually too. It's crucial for you as an e-commerce store owner to be able to conduct proper research with the help of Facebook, Google, and other means.
Another problem connected to choosing products is having too many items in your shop. The common misconception is that this will increase the average customer order value by having them choose different products all at once. But, of course, it doesn't work that way. You will not only spend days to research each product and add it to your shop but your customers will get lost when they see too many options. You don't need dozens of products to have a successful online e-commerce shop.
2. Poor Audience Research
The secret formula is not only finding the right products but also matching them to the right audience. If you don't know your audience, you will keep plowing through your ad budget with next to no results.
One way to do good audience research is to use Facebook Audience Insights. It is a great tool that will help match up products with a hungry population eager to buy. You will be able to construct buyer personas and then structure your marketing campaign around this data.
A good, thought-out, and detailed buyer persona will include such information as age, gender, education, occupation, location, hobbies, interests, and more. Try to also determine what their purchasing habits are and whether they click on ads or not. If you are serious about your e-commerce store, then you should know absolutely all of these in order to avoid the next mistake on this list.
3. Underestimating Ad Spend
If you read such articles as 5 Steps To A Successful International Digital Marketing Strategy (which I highly recommend checking out), then you probably know that search engine optimization is important. This may come as a surprise, but it won't work well without a proper ad campaign.
The thing is that it's possible to make thousands of dollars in sales with a small daily ad spend such as $5. But it's extremely difficult and highly unlikely that you will succeed unless your audience-product match is perfect. Most of than not, you will be tweaking and testing, tweaking and testing, and so on.
The ideal place to start at is to have a daily budget of $15, and instead of testing five products at once, test one. Use one ad set and have five ads in whole. By investing as much as $15 instead of only $5, you will be able to ramp up your ad stats right away and detect winning and non-performing ads at once. This will allow you to stop making guesses by looking at the measly numbers you would have got otherwise. But this doesn't mean you should stop testing, which is the next mistake on this list.
4. Not Enough Testing
This one goes hand-in-hand with planning your ad spend. Never forget that your success in e-commerce will be around 90% testing if not more. You will have to experiment until you find both the right audience and the right product to match it.
It may take weeks until you find the right audience for your products. Of course, it's possible to do this in a matter of days if you have past experience with e-commerce and you know what you're doing or you simply spend more money on your ads. Unfortunately, most of the time it will be a tedious process that may be quite costly and discouraging.
Being persistent, stubborn even, is the only approach you can take with e-commerce. It's not easy, so you will either have to adjust to it or quit after a month of pointless poking here and there. Only the most dedicated survive in the online business industry.
5. Not Leveraging Proven Online Marketing Tactics
Leveraging e-commerce online marketing strategies is essential to getting what you want. And what you want is to finally start earning money with your online e-commerce store. Otherwise, everything you're doing is not worth it.
The sad truth is that most e-commerce store owners are not marketers, especially not online marketers. But this doesn't mean you can't learn the skills you need to market your online business properly. Email marketing, copywriting, SEO, and discounts - all of these are not your enemies. Use these proven techniques and you will be on your way to success.
Conclusion
To sum up, don't make these stupid mistakes and try to avoid them like the plague. It's easy to get discouraged when you are faced with challenges you had no idea about. But if you go into battle prepared, you will know what to do difficult situations.