The growing popularity of ecommerce has attracted many sellers to the digital platform to sell their products. Gone are the days where a huge capital was required to select real estate, set up the store, and buy products in bulk. Ecommerce has given sellers of all scale the opportunity to do business irrespective of their size and financial muscle. Additionally, this has also encouraged the market to be filled with new product ideas and innovations and elevate customer satisfaction. According to new data, ecommerce business transactions could rise as high as $5 trillion by 2020. Although that seems to be a bright prospect for ecommerce businesses, the majority of them still struggle to take off within their first year. So what are some of the challenges faced by companies when entering the ecommerce business?
Attracting the right customer
There’s a vast difference between an online shopper and offline shopper. Most offline purchases are driven by impulse buy, packaging, and brand recall. Online shopping is driven by user recommendation, product research, social media feedback, and product review. A lot has changed in the way consumers consume content and communicate online. Retailers should figure out who their audience is and how they can effectively attract them without overspending. Since e-commerce gives businesses the chance to segment their customers and show targeted ads, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the right customer to send promotional messages.
Generating traffic
There are multiple channels and tools available in the digital medium to reach out to the customers. Businesses should leverage PPC, SEO, email, display ads, native ads, remarketing, mobile, social, and affiliates to help drive qualified traffic to their online store. They should be visible when their target audience is online on the internet. Since all similar competitors are competing to grab the attention of similar target audience, generating quality traffic for the website is a challenging task.
Building brand and trust
In the traditional store format, consumers would build trust with the companies only through their physical presence. The store layout, size, sales representative, and support employees would all work together to build the brand and trust amongst the consumers. However, in the digital world where physical presence is almost nil, it’s hard to build brand trust. Also, customers are very demanding, and failure to deliver on one aspect of the customers’ demand would lead to failure in retaining them.
Product personalization
We have come a long way in product personalization since the days of Henry Ford’s mass-produced black cars. Today, customer demand personalization and companies are judged on their ability to provide a personalized experience. Although ecommerce companies have the data of their customers, it can get challenging to understand how to use that data. One of the biggest ecommerce challenges faced by businesses is the delivery of customized content and promotion in the form of advertisement, special offers, coupon codes, and so on.
Increasing conversions and retention
One of the most effective ways of increasing revenue for a business is to widen the conversion funnel and retain the customers. Online customers browse thousands of products and use the cart to bookmark items. At a certain point, it is necessary to convert such customers into paying ones. Additionally, leads generated from website and emails should also be converted into customers. Once the customer is onboard, it is necessary to retain the customers and increase their lifetime value, which, in turn, delivers revenue to business in the long run.
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