These days, anyone with enough capital, an internet connection, and solid business knowledge can start their own e-commerce websites.
However, it still has a failure rate of at least 80%, sinking the ship of many passionate online store owners even before they can start their internet journey! The inability to scale business campaigns is often one of the biggest reasons for these failures.
But what exactly causes an e-commerce website to limit its scaling of campaigns, halting the progress of the business?
Let’s find out!
Limited Website Traffic (Low CTR)
There are only a few things that can easily and completely kill a retail or wholesale business. The lack of shoppers or customers is, without a doubt, one of them. Or if we are talking about the e-commerce website, then it would be the lack of website traffic.
Now, you can definitely gather more traffic to your website using paid advertisements like Google Shopping Ads or Facebook Ads.
But if your ads are not appealing enough, they will have an exceedingly low CTR. And it would automatically translate into low website traffic once again. Plus, an ad campaign with low CTR is like burning money.
You may get more visitors if you invest a lot of money in the campaigns, but if the CTR and ROAS aren’t good enough, you will be losing money and will be quickly out of business.
So, make sure you create solid ad campaigns with attractive incentives in order to improve the ad CTR and gather more traffic to your e-commerce website.
Apart from that, you should also work on your website’s SEO and run solid SEO marketing campaigns. With an effective SEO marketing campaign, your site will rank higher on SERPs for your targeted keywords, which will get you a large number of qualified leads.
Failing to do so will lower your website traffic, leading to a complete business shutdown in the long term.
Poor Website Performance (aka Slow Site Speed)
Your e-commerce website might be getting a lot of traffic. But if your website’s performance is not good enough, it will be impossible to retain your prospects. In fact, many people might leave your website without a second thought if it has a poor design and loading speed.
But that’s not all.
If your website’s loading speed is too slow, Google will believe that your website provides a poor user experience. If this keeps going and is not solved fast enough, Google may push your site down in SERPs and even put it in a disadvantageous position in the Shopping Ads.
This will result in a severe loss of traffic and sales. This will also limit you from scaling your SEO or paid advertisement campaigns.
Limited Payment Options
Let’s face it. You like it when an online store offers you multiple payment options. And your customers would expect the same from your e-commerce website in India too.
Sure, many customers will probably make their payments using the limited number of options you provide. Probably, you’re only offering credit and debit cards as payment options.
But what if your customer doesn’t like the option? What if the credit or debit card payment option isn’t working for them and showing an error?
In these cases, your customer won’t be able to make their payment, and you won’t be making the sales.
What’s more, many Indian customers often choose cash on delivery as their preferred payment option. If your website doesn’t provide this as one of the payment options, you will be losing out on a good portion of customers.
So, try to select a payment gateway that allows you to offer multiple payment options like UPI, cash on delivery, credit card, debit card, wallet, etc. With limited payment options, it will be difficult to scale your campaigns and get a high ROAS.
Lack of Product Diversitya
While you may think the diversity of products on your website is perfect, the customers may have a different opinion. Yes, we understand that selecting the right products for your website and adding them is no easy job. You have to spend hours of time researching and comparing various metrics just to select and add a few products to your website. Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a limited amount of products.
However, this rule only applies to the sites that are providing their own exclusive product that people will not find anywhere else. Nevertheless, if you’re selling hot and in-demand products that people can also find on other websites, limiting your products and having no product diversity will severely limit your website’s progress.
So, if you want to scale your e-commerce website marketing campaigns, you should add more products to your website and diversify the product ranges.
Inefficient Fulfillment Process
An inefficient fulfilment process or the lack of inventory management is probably some of the most pressing issues many e-commerce business owners face these days.
In this era of same-day delivery, more and more customers are looking forward to getting their orders delivered to them faster. In fact, according to BusinessWare, nearly 65% of consumers are ready to pay more money in shipping fees just to get their products delivered to them faster.
Clearly, having a slow or inefficient fulfilment process that causes multiple delays in order delivery will cause a lot of customers to be unhappy. They might not even do business with your company anymore.
That’s why you should hire a proper delivery fulfilment and logistics company that can deliver the orders to your customers faster.
Otherwise, even if you scale your marketing campaigns, the slow delivery time and inefficient fulfilment process might cause a lot of missed or cancelled orders.
Poor Customer Service
Whether it’s a large or small business, no company will ever be able to persist in this cut-throat market if they don’t provide solid customer support. This is especially true for e-commerce websites in India or anywhere in the world.
If your business deals with online retailing, your customers are bound to have a lot of questions regarding the products, shipping policies, refund policies, or something else. And if you are not able to provide them with the answer they are looking for faster, they will go to the other online stores.
Even 15 years ago, people had to write a letter or email of complaint to online businesses to get their refund. Everything was settled in private. But that’s not the case anymore.
Today, in this era of computers and smartphones, if you don’t have good customer service, the consumers are going to share their feeling online. A few bad reviews online and your whole company’s reputation will be on fire.
Once this happens, even if you scale your marketing campaigns, you are unlikely to get a good number of sales. So, make sure your business provides good customer support to improve your brand image and scale your business smoothly.
Inadequate Marketing Budget
How are you going to scale the marketing campaign if you don’t even have an adequate marketing budget?
The answer is you can’t. There is just no way!
But why does it happen? Often, the lack of an adequate marketing budget caused because of poor money management. It can also happen if your e-commerce site didn’t make profits in ages and you have no source of inflowing money or investor support.
Many new business owners often pile up their inventory with needlessly large numbers of products that jam the marketing budget. Because of this, they are no longer able to scale their marketing campaigns, which halts their business growth.
Poor SEO Strategy
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that allows your business to rank higher in the SERPs. Ranking higher in Google SERPs provides your website with enough exposure to get tens of thousands of high-quality leads every month that are more likely to convert than the leads generated via PPC or social media ads.
However, many e-commerce site owners in India leave the SEO strategies for later. However, SEO takes time. And you would want to establish your website as a top contender for the keywords you are targeting as soon as possible.
Sure, you can try not relying on SEO strategies and focus solely on paid ads and influencer marketing. However, in the long term, you will miss hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales every year if you ignore the e-commerce SEO.
The extra sales from SEO marketing could give you more leeway to experiment with different ads and scale your other marketing campaigns.
Wrapping It Up
E-commerce websites or businesses have an astounding 80% – 90% failure rate, which is quite high when you compare it to the failure rate of other types of businesses.
Not being able to scale your marketing campaigns and your business in the long term is often one of the biggest reasons that contribute to online business failure.
We have listed some of the biggest mistakes online retail business owners make that lead to this failure. Study these common mistakes and learn how to fix them or prevent them from occurring so you can have a smooth e-commerce journey!
