I like to help e-merchants succeed in E-commerce. That's why I made it my job as an E-commerce expert. Last time, I was talking to a client and he told me : "Thank you Benoît for the help you have given me otherwise I would have made big mistakes in my investments. And he asked me the question "what do you think are the most common recurring mistakes made by e-merchants?"
I thought it was a good question and it was relevant to share with you what came out of it. To do this, I analyzed the information I gathered on the 400 e-commerce consulting missions I have carried out over the past 15 years. And here is a compilation of the main problems in E-commerce that I have encountered.
Be careful, this approach remains empirical and even if the sample analyzed is large, it may not be representative. And yes, by analyzing data as an E-commerce Director, we develop certain habits. So it is not said that you will encounter the same problems or make the same mistakes of course! For those who want to be careful and put all the chances on their side, the list of the most common mistakes in e-commerce is below.
Starting in e-commerce is never easy! There are many things to learn and there is usually no time to spare between the creation of the e-commerce site, the catalogue and the business plan. When talking about creating an e-commerce site, here is often the number one mistake of future e-merchants:
Paying too much for your e-commerce site and certainly the most frequent mistake I have seen with many e-merchants. Be careful, this does not mean that e-commerce agencies are too expensive or that you have been ripped off.
Everything is always related to your budget and it is in this sense that we must understand "too expensive".
E-merchants have often spent too much of their budget on creating the site at the expense of the rest. And I can understand them! The moment of the creation of the site is a unique moment when you want to express your creativity and give free rein to your desires.
Agencies are not there to restrict their customers and therefore follow the trend. However, the development time has a cost. The more time agencies spend there, the more they will charge.
Remaining reasonable on the first version of his site is therefore essential! Try to reduce the technical part of your costs as much as possible by using solutions such as Shopify, with a shopify expert or Wizishop.
Even if you want to own your site, you will have plenty of time if it works well commercially to redo it. The opposite is not true. Ideally, and except in exceptional cases, your development budget should not represent more than 10 to 15% of your expenses in the first year (including merchandise purchases and web marketing).
And why keep a maximum budget? Because the real difficulty of e-commerce is not in website creation, but in customer acquisition and web marketing.
And this is the second most common mistake among e-merchants I have seen: not investing enough in webmarketing. Whether in an SEO consultant or in one of the marketing audits or simply in traffic acquisition. Webmarketing, which includes the creation of traffic to your site through all possible channels, is really the major point that will allow your site to survive. There is nothing worse than a site with no traffic. No traffic = no sales.
Moreover, contrary to popular belief, webmarketing is not "buying traffic" but rather "renting it" from Google and Facebook (or others). With few exceptions, you will therefore need to devote a significant and recurring budget to webmarketing. There is not necessarily an ideal budget because it depends on the average margin of your e-commerce site and the type of products.
Generally, I advise as much as possible to aim for a maximum of 15% of webmarketing / order costs. This means that if you make a sale at 120 € including tax, your ideal acquisition cost should be around 15 € (100 € excluding tax * 15%). This is not always possible at the beginning! It is often necessary to invest much more on Adwords or Facebook and "compensate" with emails or SEO. Some sites, at launch, may have fees of more than 40 or 50 € of acquisition cost per order. So always plan for a margin! And if your products are recurring, it is not "necessary" to make your customers profitable on the first order. The best way to do this is to share your information with other e-merchants (and yes I know that many e-merchants hate it!) but this is my third info: don't do it all by yourself.
I no longer count the e-merchants on the verge of burnout who contacted me far too late to be able to be supported in e-commerce. Staying alone for several years to develop your business commercially is obviously based on a good reasoning: controlling costs and being able to reinvest in your e-commerce site to succeed.
But at what cost? Sometimes unfortunately at the cost of the founders' health. Entrepreneurship is not always pink. But very often, it doesn't go that far. Getting help, advice, exchanging with peers on a forum, facebook or during a web or e-commerce aperitif allows you to change your ideas and meet complementary skills.
This is an advice I give to all my customers: your goal is not to do everything yourself but to set up an organization, with machines and people, to make your site run.
I'm not talking about a 100% automatic site because I think they remain rare and irrelevant for the moment. On the other hand, it is a good thing that your SEO runs every day and that your site progresses even when you personally don't have time to make content. Moreover, e-commerce has become enormously more complex over the past 20 years. Being competent in all areas is not easy! Hiring a specialist or an e-commerce manager can help you earn more money or streamline certain aspects of your e-business.
Speaking of points to optimize, the stock is almost always too large among the customers I have met. It is certainly important to be able to ship products quickly and therefore to have them in stock.
But if there's one thing I learned from my, far away, accounting classes: Stock is bad ! It is expensive, it takes up space, in most cases, it depreciates... No advantage to store. Aim for operational efficiency first and the lowest possible stock. That's why dropshipping is so popular at the moment: by removing the painful management of stock, we find ourselves with easier businesses.
Eliminating its stock is not a good idea and is in my opinion not desirable but optimizing it yes! Which products have more than 15 days in stock? What products are in stock and not online? In stock and inactive on the site?
Do a little cleaning in your stock to see more clearly and make your site more readable at the same time. All this is visible in the data of your e-commerce dashboards of your solution generally.
And that's the last mistake on our list for today: don't use the data at your disposal to boost your e-commerce or do an audit of your e-commerce site. Reading a Google Analytics report can be complicated, but there are many data sources for your site. Consider at least once a week selecting one and turning it into action.
Do you read the keywords that bring you the most traffic? So take action and create new content based on these keywords. Have you analyzed your stock? Then select the 10 products with the worst rotation and get rid of them immediately with a newsletter. do not use the data you have in front of you and certainly what costs you the most growth points.
It is often said that data is the new oil but it still needs to be transformed and exploited! No need to be a data scientist to transform data into action.
So here are the five mistakes I have encountered most often with my customers so far. Don't worry, none of them are fatal and if we intervene in time, everything can be solved.
So take a few more minutes to contact me and let us discuss together your E-commerce strategy and see how to optimize your site.
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