If you design and develop a good eCommerce app, customers can access it anytime and anywhere. But just like its vast promises, Building a great eCommerce website involves some complexities and facing some tough questions.

It is wise to learn from the mistakes committed by other eCommerce apps in the competition. Well, several big and itchy mistakes made too many eCommerce ventures suffer, including a few ambitious stores.

Let us remind you that in a competitive world of eCommerce, even a small mistake can lead to the loss of big revenue, brand image, and a lot of customers.

This is why it is important for eCommerce stores to take development and design tasks rather meticulously to stay clear of the mistakes committed by others.

From usability and ease of use to security concerns to holding credibility, a hell lot of things, an eCommerce store app should address.

12 Mistakes Which Can Ruin Your eCommerce App:

Let us explain some of the most lethal mistakes that can ruin an eCommerce app.

1. Long and Strenuous Onboarding

Do you want your users to get started quickly, browser products, and make buying decisions? Well, that is something every eCommerce store wants to achieve.

For your mobile eCommerce store to ensure quick and steady engagement from the very first moment, you need to ensure a simple and effective onboarding. But there are too many eCommerce apps that unnecessarily make the onboarding process complex and lengthy.

For faster and smooth onboarding, there are some thumbs rules that you need to follow. First of all, make sure the app automatically detects the location, or it allows the user to choose location easily.

With the instant fixing of the location, everything just falls on a place. This is particularly true for eCommerce apps catering to an audience in particular locations or zip codes. To make things further simpler, allow them to choose the country and language right on the first app screen.

2. Slow Page Loading

According to most web experts, most users have a tendency of uninstalling an app if it takes more than 2 seconds of loading time. Since customers these days are more restless and impatient than ever before, any delay beyond a few seconds can only encourage them to go elsewhere and search for a product in a different app.

Anything beyond this is a waste of time. Customers are always on the move. Any delay in loading a webpage will drive them to your competitor’s website. Therefore, you need to be extra careful and watchful of your website’s performance.

Now coming to a solution, for boosting page loading speed, you need to take care of a lot of factors. First of all, evaluate the page loading speed and overall performance of the app. You need to inquire about network speed, cache, type of content, hosting server, etc.

3. No Personalization

The biggest mistake, according to many experts, is the lack of personalization in eCommerce stores.

Since social platforms and websites help customers to buy any item directly without needing to download the branded app, you need to provide motivation to make them opt for an eCommerce app.

Often the real incentive for the users is a personalized shopping experience that makes them download the Mobile eCommerce app.

Some of the key ways to allow personalization in shopping experience include the following.

  • Addressing every customer by name and while communicating, maintaining a personal tone, and greeting customers on special dates such as birthday, graduation day, etc.
  • An eCommerce app must remember the previous searches and showcase products accordingly.
  • It should allow saving your wish lists and purchases for delayed or future transactions.
  • It should make recommendations and suggestions based on your earlier searches, purchases, and preferences.
  • You should have a personal account with all the options of tweaking certain features and options.

4. Incomplete Product Information

Remember, eCommerce has the disadvantage of not allowing people to touch and see products.

This is why you need to fulfill these shortcomings with detailed product information, high-quality images, and, if possible, even a user video. Since customers can’t have a first-hand experience of the product, the description should be as complete as possible.

5. Product Descriptions Look Plagiarized

The internet has no place for plagiarized, duplicated, and dishonest content. This is true for product descriptions of eCommerce apps as well. The product details and descriptive images should be of high quality and clearly explaining the value.

Secondly, the text copy should be unique and original. Any description taken from competitor apps or websites can be considered plagiarized, and this can unnecessarily pull down your brand credibility.

In case your competitors rankings are stronger than yours, and you use their content for description, the search engine will always give the original content publisher a priority over duplicates. On the other hand, unique content in the description may look credible and enhance your chances in search engine ranks.

For this, eCommerce stores must ensure publishing unique and keyword-rich content. Secondly, the content for describing the products should be precise and flawless.

Use plagiarism checkers and various online tools for proofreading and quality optimization. The copywriters should have the skills and creative excellence to tweak descriptions in a way that sounds unique.

 6. Duplicate Titles

Duplication of any page, content, product description, product prototype, and services is likely to be considered as grave mistakes that can pull down your brand credibility and, in turn, can ruin your sales. Instead of duplicating page title from the competitors, consider writing each page title in a unique manner. Try to maintain resonance with the user flow of your eCommerce app.

You also need to make sure each of your page titles is different and unique. The page titles are there to explain what the page is all about to the search engines as well as to the customer prospects.

In case several page titles look similar, search engines will consider them troublesome for recognizing. In case of similar page titles, search engines don’t select any of them, and thus the eCommerce stores lose a chance to get search ranks.

Make sure you review the page titles effectively. For faster evaluation, just find them in the CMS. You can just change the page titles one by one right in your CMS.

You can also export all pages in bulk by using a software application after the modification is done to import them back to the website. There is also another effective method, and it is by using a simple template to build new and current page titles in a consistent manner.

7. Not Maintaining the Thumb Rule

Most mobile users now hold the device single-handedly while browsing or scrolling the apps.

This is particularly true for the young and millennial audience. As mobile screens continue to get bigger, reaching for the buttons and clickable elements for single-handed users became really difficult.

It is a big mistake if an eCommerce app is not designed keeping this thumb rule in mind.

For example, by following common conventions, you can place the search bar at the top of the screen, and this convention can help users to access the search field with easy thumb movement. You need to provide most of the crucial clickable buttons and important tap targets within reach of the user’s thumb.

8. Long-Drawn Checkout

It is a key mistake and one of the most concerning ones for any eCommerce app. The checkout process is key to eCommerce store success, and it is the checkout page from where products are sold.

This is why a long drawn checkout process taking unnecessary time will only result in making people leave your app without completing a purchase.

This is why it is recommended to deliver a simple and straightforward checkout process without unnecessary questions asked.

9. Making Customer Account Mandatory

Every eCommerce store tries to get personal contact details of customers for retargeting purposes. While this is perfectly fine as a practice, this should not be overbearing for the intending buyers.

If a customer wants to browse the store and make purchases without an account, he should be allowed to do so. At best, you can allow him to sign up with his social account credentials or log in as a guest to complete the purchase.

10. Invisible Contact Details

No customer can rely on a store for making a purchase by sharing their vital financial information if they cannot trust the brand. This is why it is extremely important to provide valid contact details representing the store.

When providing contact information like email ID, phone number, and social media page links, show them in a prominent place, preferably at the top right side of the page.

11. Using Stock Images

This is a common eCommerce store mistake committed by many businesses. Poor quality images of products or images sourced from stock photo websites can just ruin your credibility as a business brand. High quality and original images can show your brand in a good light.

This requires investing in a professional photographer to ensure the optimum quality of images for your eCommerce store. The original images shot for your products will not only give a better view of your saleable items for the customers, but they will also make customers find your app interesting and fresh.

Apart from using high quality and original images, you also need to implement some features that can be helpful for customers to see the items closely. You should provide a magnifying image feature on all the product pages to help customers enlarge or zoom in the images and get a detailed view.

12. Bad Payment Gateways

For eCommerce stores, security is of utmost importance. The security is particularly essential in respect of payment gateways. Since customers, while buying from eCommerce stores, need to share credit and debit card information and banking details, using reliable gateways is of seminal importance.

To make things secure and to make an impression of your secure and safe solution, you need to deliver tangible assurance. A reliable and trustworthy gateway is the most important way to gain the trust of customers.

This will give them the impression that their payment and details are safe as and when they carry out any transaction. This is particularly important for smaller or new services. One can deliver secure transactions by allowing using of standard SSL encryption.

In this respect, you must know that a PCI-DSS compliant payment system has already become an industry standard and is known to add credibility and trust to any online store. Without being able to ensure such standards, serious legal issues, and payment related frauds can take place.

Conclusion

All these mistakes seem to be common across too many eCommerce stores, including big and small ones. Many of these stores got instant results with respect to increased sales and revenue by addressing these mistakes.

Author Bio

Juned Ghanchi is working as a Chief Marketing Officer at IndianAppDevelopers Company, leading a place to hire app developers India for iOS and Android projects. He is an avid reader about Mobility and web technologies to update his technological development.