Ecommerce Mistakes to Avoid While Developing an Online Store in 2022

Today, ecommerce businesses are ruling the Internet. Reports suggest that there are nearly 3 million ecommerce companies in the world and all of them are striving to rule the industry. But, it’s worth understanding that leading the ecommerce market is not a cakewalk, mainly due to fierce competition.

Due to a higher number of Ecommerce stores, it’s always challenging for new entrepreneurs to attract their potential customers and drive the projected sales. In such a competitive scenario, it’s safe to say that new ecommerce ventures must avoid random development mistakes to launch a sales-driven online store.

No doubt, mistakes are an inevitable part of the Ecommerce website development journey, but if entrepreneurs are familiar with these blunders in advance, they’ll be able to devise a custom development plan to avoid them.

To make your job easier, we are going to introduce a few of the most common ecommerce development mistakes you must avoid to launch a successful ecommerce business in 2022.

1. Choosing the Wrong Development Partner

Unless you have an in-house team of ecommerce experts, you are most likely to look for third-party ecommerce website development services.

But, before you go out and hire a random team of developers, understand that the expertise of these developers will decide the future of your business. An unprofessional team of ecommerce developers can easily wreak havoc and cost you money & time.

So, if you are going to outsource ecommerce development to a third-party team, make sure to do your due diligence by penning down your business objectives, and compare different service providers accordingly.

The general thumb rule says that you should hire a development team who has worked on similar ecommerce projects in the past and understand the market inside out.

2. Ecommerce Mistakes to Avoid: Poor Navigation

Having a fully navigable online store can do wonders for your brand!

How? Well, proper navigation allows consumers to find the desired product within seconds. Regardless of which page they are currently browsing, if your website is easy-to-navigate, they’ll be able to reach a particular product page within 2-3 clicks.

This will not only enhance the user-friendliness of your website but also make it easier to lower the bounce rate. Since users would be able to reach any product page within seconds, they are less likely to get frustrated and most likely to complete the purchase.

Now, there are different ways to make your website easy to navigate. To get started, you can place a navigation bar at the top of each page on your website. This navigation bar must contain links to all the major categories along with dedicated submenus so that a shopper can find a particular product easily.

3. Slow Loading Pages

Slow loading pages are the biggest threat to your sales. If your web pages don’t load within 3 seconds, your website visitors will most likely bounce back to Google search results. Apart from affecting your sales, slow loading web pages will also damage your brand reputation and make it challenging to acquire long-term customers.

To avoid such instances, it would be imperative to optimize the loading speed of your website so that customers don’t have to wait for too long for the pages to load. You can start by compressing all the images to lower their size. This won’t put too much load on the server and your web pages will load at lightning-fast speed.

You can also perform Google’s page speed insight test to check the current performance of all your web pages. It’s an official web application designed by Google to analyze the speed performance of a website. The tool will provide you with a deep analysis of the current status of your web pages and also display a few tactics to tackle speed-related issues.

4. Non-Responsive Page Design

As of 2022, nearly 77% of online shoppers use mobile phones to shop online. It means more than half of ecommerce sales come from smartphones, which makes it crucial for ecommerce owners to optimize their websites for mobile users.

One of the ways to do this is to choose a responsive design for your website. With a responsive design, your web pages will automatically adjust their layout based on the screen size of the end devices. So, irrespective of the device users use to access your website, it’ll deliver a user-friendly experience all the time.

If you have availed professional ecommerce development team will ensure to optimize the website for mobile users. However, even if you are using one of the ready-to-launch website builders like Shopify, you can choose one of the responsive themes to enhance the overall mobile-friendliness of your online store.

5. Unnecessary Pop-Ups

There’s no arguing the fact that pop-ups are a great way to strengthen your email marketing list and share your latest discounts/offers with the customers. But, it’s also worth pointing out that these pop-ups can also ruin the shopping experience for customers, especially if you display them everywhere.

Instead, strategize your pop-ups properly and avoid using them unnecessarily.

For instance, it’s never a good strategy to place these pop-ups on the final checkout page. Why? Because this is the stage when the shopper is ready to make the final payment and doesn’t want any interruptions. So, if you display a pop-up right when they are about to make the payment, you’ll most likely end up annoying them.

With pop-ups, you can always perform A/B testing to evaluate what works best for your shoppers. Ideally, it’s a great strategy to show discount pop-ups on the home page or on the product page itself.

6. Lengthy Checkout Process

Checkouts are the final stage of an ecommerce conversion. As a business owner, you would want this process to be as straightforward as possible.

Any unnecessary elements on the checkout page will cost you potential customers and skyrocket the cart abandonment rate. To optimize the checkout page, start by eliminating unnecessary fields so that customers can fill up the entire form more rapidly.

While you’re at it, make sure to add a guest login to one-time buyers, skip the entire sign-up process, and place the order right away. Having guest logins on the product page can easily uplift your sales as shoppers won’t have to deal with the lengthy sign-up process at all.

7. Low-Quality Product Images

Finally, another ecommerce development mistake that’ll ruin your online store’s performance is the presence of low-quality product pictures.

Keep in mind that the product images that you use on your product pages will help customers decide if a particular product is right for them or not. As an ecommerce business owner, you would want to use high-quality product images to attract buyers instantly.

The Bottom Line

In 2022, running an ecommerce business is not a piece of cake. Due to the fierce competition, it’s always challenging for new entrepreneurs to establish their brand presence.

So, if you are planning to launch an Ecommerce app store in the near future, it would be imperative to devise a well-strategized development approach and avoid the above-mentioned blunders.

This will help you launch your ecommerce store and reach your potential customers for better sales opportunities. If you are not an expert, you can also search for professional developers to build a sales-driven online store for your customers.