Once upon a time, it was easy to sell anything and make tons of money. The competition was minimal, and technology was affordable. But not anymore. Now, with Amazon and China opening to the world, it’s nearly impossible to deliver products fast without facing some challenges.
Here are some of the most common challenges faced by eCommerce business owners today and how to overcome those challenges.
The Right Product to sell
Unless you have a product of your own (in that case, move on to the next challenge), finding the right product is the first challenge that you’ll face. Anyone can launch an online store, but to find the product that the customer wants and present them so that they can order it online is a real challenge.
Amazon and AliExpress have all the products, and they are selling and shipping them to the world. So, if you don’t have a clue which product to sell, you should find it on Amazon and see what the most popular products are online.
This will give you some idea on which products you need to sell, and you’ll also need to find a supplier that can make bulk quantities of that product.
Attract the target customer
Online shopping today is not as it used to be. Previously, people just relied on word of mouth and purchased the product. Now they search the product on Amazon, read reviews on social media, and check the reliability of the website.
Finding your target customer is not accessible anymore. You need to search on social media; you need to dig into online forums and see where your target market is. Once you find that target market, you need to make them realize that you are selling something unique.
Surely, spending money to run ads is okay, but to know which ads will reach the market is another challenge that we will deal with later.
Getting Quality Traffic
There are tons of digital marketing channels out there. And if you don’t know which channels you need to market your customers, this might create some problems for you.
Getting traffic on the website is not enough. The real challenge that eCommerce website owners or startups face today is getting quality traffic. That’s hard to do.
There are various ways through which you can get traffic. For instance, start a blog, use social media, join forums, and market your product in those groups.
Capturing Leads
Once you have the network with you, it will be easy for you to generate leads out of it. When you interact with people, they start trusting you. And once the trust is built, it gets easy to convert those random people into leads.
You need to understand that all the leads might not be the same. The retailers must get this message straight that, at times, someone will buy the product instantly while other times, the customer will wait for the brand to interact or educate them about something. For this, open your chat and customer support.
When customers feel stuck, they usually ask questions from customer support. This is the time where a brand can help the customer and convert it into a loyal customer.
From just visitor to a paying customer
At the start, it will be difficult for the customer to trust you. If they are not getting any trust signals, it will be impossible to make them trust your brand.
The customer of today is looking for beauty, simplicity, and convenience. If you can deliver these to the customer, it will be easy for the customer to place an order on the website and move on to the best thing.
But sadly, website owners fail to realize the importance of these simple things. When customers land on your website, they look for ways to place an order and get back to work. They don’t have time to wait for a website to load or wait to figure things out on your website. They just want to place an order and go.
So, the best approach is to make it easy for the customer to do business with you by making things easy for them.
Using the right partner and technology
A great deal of problems arrives when the eCommerce website starts shipping products. A professional M&P courier service might take care of things differently, but if the delivery is handled loosely, this might make customers upset.
You need to use technology to make things easy for the customer. Ensure that you deliver over-the-top customer experience.
When you partner with the right people, there will be fewer challenges to face or at least even if challenges arrive, and these people will help you to grow and scale your business.
Hire the right people for the job
As a startup, everyone will be doing everything. But as a business scale, it will be challenging to find the right people for the job. Attracting the right talent is a real challenge. You need people who are eager to work and add value to your business.
You can do that by finding people on LinkedIn. Check the forums and see which of the people are interested in your line of work. Interact with them and see if they are willing to join your business.
In the end
It’s all about dealing with the challenges and growing with them.
No one will remember you by the problems that you face, but everyone will remember you by the solutions you gave to solve these problems.
These challenges will come, and if you can deal with these challenges, then things will be easy for you.
