5 Mistakes That Will Crush Your Online Sales

It’s not easy to know exactly what to do to ensure that a business makes enough sales to stay healthy. There are too many different things that can affect a young business, from the choice of words in the sales copy to the way you target your audience.

The newest members of the online sales and marketing ecosystem have more than enough sources at their disposal to turn to for help. From online articles that describe how to increase sales, to big conferences like Dreamforce where you can go and learn things that will have a huge impact on your online sales performance.

But still, the road to strong and increasing sales looks more like a minefield than a road. For every thing you could be doing right, there are lots of ways you could be doing the same thing wrong. So here are five of the not-so-obvious mines in that minefield you should look out for.

Making a Website that Isn’t Mobile-Friendly

There’s no excuse for not having a mobile-friendly website in this day and age. In the United States, roughly one-third of all e-commerce sales are performed from mobile devices, and that number is expected to continue growing.

But people can also shop on your website from mobile devices even if it isn’t mobile-friendly, right? Well, they can, but they’re not likely to. A website that’s not optimized for mobile viewing will probably load too slowly on a mobile device, appear illegible, or be too difficult to navigate. So unless you have a customer base that’s willing to completely forgo convenience and good user experience only to be able to buy at your online store, you must have a mobile-friendly website.

Cramming all Social Proof on One Page

Social proof – user testimonials and reviews — are one of the key building blocks of conversion-optimized landing pages. But those short statements made by people who actually used your product can and should be used on your website as well.

The way some businesses are handing testimonials is to dedicate one page where they put all the content that demonstrates how real people found their products or services useful. That’s not a good strategy. Testimonials and reviews can increase the trustworthiness your website has in the visitors’ eyes, but only if people actually see them. And if you cram all of them on one page, it’s not that likely that people will seek them out. So spread your social proof around so that the visitors cannot miss it.

Believing that Autoplay Multimedia Is Great

Having audio, video, and animated content on your web page that starts playing on its own, as soon as a person opens a page, can turn the visitors off in more ways than one. Some of those formats slow down the loading time of your web page or delay loading of some elements on the page. They can distract from your calls-to-action. They make your website look like one of those spam sites that have offers you simply can’t afford to miss out on.

Having multimedia elements can work great for your website. You can use everything from video testimonials to how-to videos to boost your sales, as long as you let the users choose to watch them. The only way autoplay can work on a page is if you make sure that a person visiting the page is doing so because they want to watch a video. Otherwise, it’s just clutter.

Withholding Valuable Information from the Customers

Product descriptions are very important, even if they’re used alongside great product images. Those snippets of copy give you a chance to say nice things about the product and do some search engine optimization. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to include some valuable information about the product and how it should be used.

In some cases, withholding product information can affect your sales directly. Selling furniture on a website without listing its measurements will do that. But in some cases, your failure to disclose information will cost you repeat purchases, like if you fail to mention that the clothing articles you sell are not machine washable. People like to have important information before they make a decision. If you don’t give it to them, you’re asking them to take a leap of faith, and not everyone would do it.

Giving Customers Every Reason to Abandon the Cart

At around 70%, online shopping cart abandonment rates are something that should be taken very seriously. Seven out of ten people who put something in an online shopping cart will leave the website without making a purchase. But that’s how things are — some people use shopping carts as part of their online window shopping, or pricing research, or purchase planning.

It’s those who are turned off by your website you should be worrying about. The top reasons people abandon shopping carts are too high additional costs, the need to create an account, the checkout process was too long, the inability to calculate the order upfront, or the website had errors. Most of those issues, if not all, you can minimize. Each and every sale is important, so you should make sure that the checkout procedure presents the customers with as few barriers as possible.