15 Mistakes That Can Cost You in Online Sales

What’s your current lead-to-sales conversion ratio? Are you confident of every aspect of your site, to woo your leads and make them commit? User feedback gives an entirely different picture to the impression that sellers have of their websites. Check your site for the following mistakes and make fixes if any.

1. Unclear Call To Action

A perfectly worded Call To Action tells your visitors exactly what action to take – whether the action is to subscribe, register, download or purchase. Your call to action should be visible and should be easy to read. Failing to do so is an easy way to lose conversions.

2. Complex, Or Unfriendly Website

The more professional your site looks, the greater your credibility. Get your site tested by usability experts for maximum user friendliness. Ensure smooth navigation, great template, good color choices, and uniformity in layout and so on. Keep an eye on content integrity as well; avoid spelling errors and bad formatting.

3. Too Many Options

Don’t confuse your leads with too many options. Make product choices clear so that they can make their selection quickly and easily. Limit your offerings within each category to enable easy selection.

4. Too Much Distraction

Don’t distract your lead with too much text and graphics on a single page. These things take away your visitor’s attention from their true objective.

5. Complicated Checkout Process

Once your customer has decided to make a purchase, the rest of the process should be intuitive and easy. Allow clear purchase options; don’t insist on registration, additional information or newsletter subscription at this point. Make sure the process is error free as well.

6. Misleading Ads

When a user clicks an Ad for a particular product or service, they must land at a page which talks only about that offering. There’s no point in achieving traffic numbers if you cannot convert your leads.  Misleading Ads can negatively impact your credibility.

7. Failed Transactions Due To Poor Coding

Imagine that a visitor has made his first purchase, only to find that after providing his credit card information or logging into his online payment gateway, the purchase transaction fails. At this point your customer is left without knowing whether the order is complete or if he’s just lost money on the transaction. Failed transactions cause a lot of stress and a major loss of trust and confidence with your service.

8. Insecure Payment Gateway

Your customer feels brave enough to trust you based on your credentials and testimonials and provides his credit card information. If your site’s payment gateway is not secure, you will not only lose that customer but word of mouth will cause major negative impact.

9. Not Being Available For Customer Redressal

Be available to your customers 24/7, 365 days a year. Set up a good customer service center so that your customers can approach you at any time to report issues. Being unavailable when the customer needs you is a really costly mistake.

10. Poor Customer Services

Adequate followup and sufficient customer service follow up options are necessary in order to retain customer trust post sales. Make sure your Contact Us page provides plenty of contact options. Ask for customer feedback a few days after the sale is complete to show the customer you care what he thinks.

11. Insufficient Product Information On Site

Your product pages must contain detailed product information, including specs, special features, links to usage instructions, product videos, links to testimonials and authority product reviews. You have only a few seconds to help your customer make up his mind.

12. Poor Product Management

Check which products are selling quickly and keep stocked up on those. Be quick to leverage upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Don’t advertise products that you cannot stock on demand. If a product is not available, mention that clearly on the product page, along with information on when it’ll be available.

13. Over Sending Information

You want your email newsletters to be informative, useful and easy to read and digest. Do not include too much information in them. Do not, also, keep sending the same information. Allow a few days to pass before you remind customers of new offerings or special offers on your site.

14. No Product Reviews or Testimonials

A first time customer always looks for customer-feedback or testimonial. Make sure you link both customer testimonials and product reviews (by authority bloggers in your industry) to your product pages. Make it easy for customers to read your reviews and testimonials and make up their own minds.

15. Not Tracking Or Testing Landing Page Results

Invest time in tracking your landing page results – review traffic logs and trace user behavior using Google Analytics Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews. This will help you customize landing pages for different products and optimize them for maximum conversions. Be sure to use A/B testing on landing page versions before sticking to a version.