It’s an online store’s worst nightmare: a haunted website. Petrified with low traffic and conversion rates, phantom products lingering around the warehouse, and an ever-growing abandoned cart graveyard. But don’t be scared, every frightful website problem can be solved.
Here are the top five things haunting your website and how to get rid of them!
1. Spine-chillingly low ROI
The most common website nightmare is low ROI. The lights are on, decorations are up, but shoppers aren’t stopping by.
In fact, about 95% of websites get less than 30 visitors per day; anything less than 1,000 unique visitors per week can qualify your site as “low traffic.” Driving up traffic is the first step you need to take. If no one is visiting your site, you won’t have any shoppers that transform into buyers.
Another issue facing online businesses is low conversion rates. Conversion rates are what fuels eCommerce, turning browsers into customers, and boosting sales. The average conversion rate across industries is 2% to 5%. While not terrible, there is a huge incentive to break into the top 10% of online stores, which have conversion rates of 11% or higher.
Solution
Boost your traffic and conversion rates by first optimizing your website for search engines. By adding backlinks to your website and sprinkling in some pertinent keywords, you can rise to the top in search results. Once you’ve improved your search ranking, you can begin redesigning aspects of your site. With A/B testing, you can change your calls to action, images, or anything you want to see what gets clicked on the most and what works best for you.
2. Ghoulishly Outdated Technology
Ecommerce platforms develop operating systems, utilities, and applications that are optimized for the hardware available at the current time. As time goes on and hardware evolves, your systems can become outdated. This outdated technology causes spine-chilling instability, increased downtime, and productivity loss. It can be difficult to keep up with everything, but there are a few pieces of technology that you should invest in.
Solution
Live chat is one technological feature that shoppers are beginning to expect on websites. Around 51% of consumers say a business needs to be available 24/7, and live chat helps solve this by making companies always available. On top of that, 92% of live chat users were satisfied with the experience they had.
Another way to make sure you’re not left caught in the cobwebs is by using analytic tools, like an inventory management software. Tools like this can scare the ghouls away and improve inventory levels between 20% and 50%
3. Big Bad Data
Another scary issue retailers face is hair-raisingly bad data. Sometimes data is poorly gathered and analyzed, which is not only an inconvenience, but also costly. Bad data can cost businesses between 10-25% of an organization’s revenue. But it’s not all the data’s fault. Most companies only analyze 12% of the data they mine, costing the US economy more than $3 trillion a year. If however, they were able to leverage big data to its full power they could increase their operating margins by as much as 60%.
Solution
So what can you use to huff, puff, and blow this problem down? First, stop using a middleman to gather your data–who knows if it’s been tampered with or not. Instead, collect data directly from each transaction. Make decisions based on firm analytics and make sure you have enough; take your time analyzing it.
4. Haunted Inventory
Just like the rickety old house at the end of the street, no one will visit your website if your inventory looks old, scary, and haunted. Don’t be “that house”–renovate your inventory and optimize your product assortment with popular items. Be sure to offer a full assortment of products for shoppers to choose from or risk losing them. In fact, 77% of shoppers will go elsewhere if they can’t find a product they want on a website.
Solution
This doesn’t mean you should stock up on every product known to man. Especially when the typical cost of carrying inventory is 25% of the total value of a given item. Instead, you can invest in repricing software to help move products. When companies invest in price optimization software, they can increase margins by 10%. Another solution is to perform a gap analysis for you and your competitors, and figure out what they’re selling that you’re not.
5. Beware of Slashers!
HOW WE TRIPLED ECOMMERCE REVENUE IN 18 MONTHS
By capitalizing on conversion-centric email marketing, social media, online giveaways, and abandoned cart emails, we significantly increased brand loyalty, awareness, and most importantly—eCommerce sales.
There is plenty of price competition out in the world, and just like a bad horror villain, competitors will constantly be after you–slashing prices to try to undercut you. This makes staying both competitive and profitable rather difficult. Keeping up on competitor pricing is hard, but important. Eighty percent of customers list “price” as the most important feature when deciding whether to make a purchase. With big brand stores like Amazon changing their prices every 10 minutes, it can seem impossible to keep up, let alone stay in front of those evil slashers!
Solution
Lucky for us, there’s always a way to fight back against monsters. In this case, our weapon of choice is dynamic pricing. Manual price changes are impossible if you plan to keep up with competitors. Best Buy alone changes their prices roughly 50,000 times a month. Investing in a dynamic pricing software like Wiser, Digonex, or PROS is helpful for both you and your customers.
Ecommerce can be a scary and tricky place, but there are plenty of ways for you to still get your treats. The monsters we face might seem frightening at first glance, but are more likely to be opportunities hiding behind a mask.
Don’t let fear hold your eCommerce business back: use the resources available to you here or let our expert monster hunters take care of things for you!
