The biggest challenge when you take your business online is targeting the right channel to the market and successfully converting shoppers into paying customers.
Back in the day, the competition was minimal and doing business wasn’t that challenging. In this era, user behaviour has moved online. With the introduction of e-commerce, there’s more fierce competition now than ever before. Starting or taking an online business has never been more difficult. Amazon is a major competitor to everyone now. And the share of Chinese products is getting higher in the market.
In an online business, there are a different set of rules and regulations one must follow. In this post, we’re going to discuss the 7 most common challenges to start your business online. This will help you to identify them, fix them, and get back to making your business a huge success.
Here are the 7 most common challenges faced by online businesses.
1) Building your own E-commerce Site
The 1st step in taking your business online is to create a website that looks good and converts. There are always some challenges in redesigning any website. However, e-commerce websites have some unique challenges that other websites don’t face. To drive relevant traffic to your site, you must have a website that is modern, classy, clean, user-friendly, secured and virus-free.
The most common website design problems are:
- Finding the right web design team
- Choosing the right technology for your website like the right shopping cart solution and inventory management software.
- Keeping yourself updated with the technology
- Adding features that enhance user experience (UX)
- Making your content informative and original
- Designing attractive CTAs that increase customer conversion
- Reducing your website's page load time. Even a one-second delay can make visitors leave your website.
- If a website isn’t mobile-friendly, mobile users will leave the site before they even start browsing your products.
2) Digital Marketing - Generating Targeted Traffic
Digital marketing is an important aspect of an online business. Digital marketing channels are evolving. Retailers can no longer rely on only one type of channel to drive traffic to their online business.
Getting your website to rank on Google for keywords related to your products is a bit challenging in the world of online businesses. On a journey towards digital entrepreneurship, you must effectively learn to use Digital Marketing Strategies such as SEO, Email Marketing, Online Advertising and Social Media Marketing. It’s important that your digital marketing strategy should be aligned with the business objective.
3) Finding the Perfect Product to Sell Online
Next biggest challenge in taking your business online is finding a profitable, in-demand product or product line that will sell.
There is strong competition in the most popular products. And Amazon seems to occupy the market with its massive product catalogue and various options. Hence, anything which you are considering to sell seems to be already being sold. Offering products which are already being sold on Amazon will make your business extremely difficult to be successful.
Generating product ideas, that people want, is a bit tricky. The internet seems to have a lot of ideas and inspiration to find the right product to sell. But sometimes searching online through heaps of information can take you nowhere. Whether you are selling a single product or an entire product line, your product should be unique in the market.
4) Customer Acquisition
Attracting new customers digitally is different from attracting them offline. Customer acquisition through digital medium has its own set of rules. If you are finding customers for B2B or B2C, the rules will differ. Online shoppers have become smart as well. They use their smartphones to read product reviews. They compare products online before purchasing anything.
If you’re looking for customers on social media, deciding right hashtags will make you find the right consumer. Deciding relevant hashtags for social media & doing promotion at the right place for the right people is a complex task.
In case of users looking for products on Google, online businesses have to decide the right keywords for the search engine. Only a right keyword can make a potential customer find the right product they’re looking for. Online businesses must figure out where their audience is and how they can attract those potential buyers efficiently.
Every online business has a specific set of users to target. Every set of users have their own needs. Hence, keeping different landing page and doing some customization for each set of users is important. Customer’s reactions and interests on the website should be noted to provide products similar to their interests.
5) Cybersecurity in Online Businesses
Every e-commerce website needs proper cybersecurity practices and tools in place. Small eCommerce businesses need to create a solid cybersecurity framework for the organization because, in case of a cyberattack, they cannot afford to have downtime in operations. These cyberattacks can seriously affect the growth of online businesses.
Keeping the data safe and secure, and implementing policies and the right technology to combat cyberattacks is a big challenge in this modern era of online business. An immediate response plan must be in place to cope with the challenges in the event of a cyberattack. Online security breaches can wipe out your whole business.
6. Return and Refund Policies
Today online shoppers first look at a retailer’s return and refund policy before taking any decision to make a purchase. They also tend to leave their shopping carts just because they were unhappy with the delivery dates. Most online shoppers don’t prefer to wait for more than 5 days for delivery. A lot of online shoppers also make an unnecessary return of products, and some of these returns come from repeated customers.
All these online shopping challenges sometimes become a major hurdle in the growth of online businesses. Offering excellent return and refund policies while maintaining the profitability of your business is an actual challenge for any online business.
7) Building Trust with the User
Every website should build trust with its user and give them a sense of security. Building trust is very necessary with online businesses since they ask users to provide their home address and credit card information in order to complete their purchase. Setting up a secure payment page for customer purchases is a bit challenging. If the users feel that the website isn’t secure, they aren’t likely to complete a purchase.
Regarding privacy, most of the users are always concerned about someone stealing their information online, or asking for their personal information. Issues like malware, identity theft, and distribution of personal information of users make them worry about whether to transact on the site or not.
Hackers can try to hack into your system and can steal your customer’s bank information. They can use it to drain your customers’ bank accounts. If they are able to do so, you may not be able to regain trust with any customer ever. Hence, you have to find and look for any potential security hole in your website that could lead to distrust. One needs to continuously update its technology to address any new threat and maintain consumer trust.
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