As more and more people turn to the web to buy goods and ser­vices, the power and pop­ular­ity of trad­ing on-line becomes even more evid­ent as it estab­lishes itself within the make up of today’s retail­ing sector.

Con­sequently the need to trade on-line with an effect­ive e-commerce strategy is now a real ‘must have’ for many tra­di­tional bricks ‘n’ mor­tar retail­ers who want to grow their businesses.

How­ever, many retail­ers make basic errors when it comes to trad­ing on-line res­ult­ing in their ven­tures col­lapsing before their very eyes leav­ing them dis­ap­poin­ted and out of pocket.

So where are they going wrong? Here are the top seven mis­takes many small retail­ers make when they decide to move their busi­ness on-line.

1. Fail­ing to Research and Plan Using the web as a sales chan­nel is full of pit­falls for the unwary so the whole idea should be a care­fully researched and thought out pro­cess like any new busi­ness ven­ture. Unfor­tu­nately many small retail­ers think they can com­pete online with the Amazon/Currys/Boots and Play.com’s of this world with an off the shelf shop­ping cart that costs them just a few hun­dred pounds (or less) mar­keted with a hand­ful of adverts in their local paper. Any busi­ness look­ing to move into e-commerce should approach the mat­ter with a work­able and real­istic busi­ness plan for the pro­ject that is S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Meas­ur­able, Achiev­able, Real­istic and Timely). To do oth­er­wise will res­ult in failure.
2. Get­ting The Name Wrong Nam­ing an online busi­ness in a sim­ilar way to a com­pet­it­ors in the hope of ‘catch­ing some of their traffic’ is a recipe for dis­aster and could leave an e-tailer open to lit­ig­a­tion. Time should be spent research­ing names that do not con­flict with an exist­ing busi­ness (on-line or off-line) that offer the same or sim­ilar products to the inten­ded online shop. This applies both here in the UK and over in the US as the Inter­net doesn’t recog­nize bor­ders. Attempts to get both the .co.uk and .com domain names for the site should be made and research­ing the name to make sure it doesn’t con­flict with any registered Trade­marks or exist­ing web­sites wil pay dividends. Use­ful resources on the web to help with this include: www.nominet.org.uk, www.companieshouse.gov.uk and www.ipo.gov.uk If the busienss has already been named it’s found to be sim­ilar to an estab­lished com­pet­itor; ser­i­ous con­sid­er­a­tion should be given to renam­ing it. It’ll save a lot of grief later.
3. Poor Site Design and Usab­il­ity No mat­ter how little or how much you spend on a site, if shop­pers can’t use it, can’t eas­ily find your products and fig­ure out how to buy them, or should they feel uncom­fort­able with the site’s secur­ity; then they will abort their sale and leave the site for another. If you’re ser­i­ous about e-commerce for your busi­ness, make sure you work with an Inter­net con­sultancy or web design agency that has exper­i­ence in the sec­tor and can deliver a site to you that is cus­tom designed for your needs. Such a com­pany will also be able to offer you advice and guid­ance through­out the pro­cess of your site’s devel­op­ment on many aspects such as mar­ket­ing, pay­ment pro­cessing and con­vert­ing vis­it­ors into sales. Remem­ber, such people may not be experts at retail­ing your products in the high street, but they are experts at build­ing online retail stores. Use them to your advant­age and listen to what they have to say with an open mind. Yes, the up front devel­op­ment costs will be higher when deal­ing with such an agency in com­par­ison to a single web developer, but it’ll pay you dividends in the long run as you’ll have a more pro­fes­sional site that is cap­able of com­pet­ing with the big boys.
4. Poor Cus­tomer Ser­vice Within the bricks and mor­tar world of retail­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice is a per­sonal, face-to-face rela­tion­ship the trader has with their cus­tom­ers and is rel­at­ively easy to man­age. In the online e-tailing world, that per­sonal con­tact ele­ment is removed and must be com­pensated for with ele­ments such as FAQ pages, secure cer­ti­fic­ates and real world con­tact addresses on your site. Eas­ily vis­ible tele­phone and email addresses that reas­sure the shop­per and the use of a good secure pay­ment pro­cessing pro­vider will build shop­per con­fid­ence. Lib­eral use of product and deliver guar­an­tees with a good pri­vacy policy and trans­par­ent T&Cs across the site will also help to reas­sure the shop­per and encour­age them to buy from your site.
5. Poor Order Ful­fill­ment Get­ting all the ‘front end’ stuff right coupled with good cus­tomer ser­vice set-up is not the end of the story if the whole pro­cess goes pear shaped once the order has been placed. It won’t take many missed orders, or orders being delivered late or dam­aged before your brand becomes tar­nished and your busi­ness starts to get a bad repu­ta­tion. A few well placed blog posts by dis­gruntled shop­pers can cause irre­par­able dam­age to any online shop and is very dif­fi­cult to erad­ic­ate once it’s on the web. So make sure that you set-up an effect­ive order ful­fill­ment strategy that is cap­able of deliv­er­ing nation­ally or if needed, inter­na­tion­ally. Set deliv­ery guar­an­tees and make sure you stick to them. Be aware that it may be neces­sary to employ staff to spe­cific­ally man­age out­go­ing orders or at the very least make it part of an employee’s job descrip­tion. Be pre­pared for this.
6. Lack of Mar­ket­ing The days of “build it and they shall come” are dead and bur­ied and it’s not good enough simply to launch a web­site and expect people to find it. The pro­mo­tion of your e-commerce web­site needs to take into account a num­ber of strategies includ­ing search engine optim­isa­tion and mar­ket­ing, online advert­ising (PPC etc), per­haps e-zines and off­line mar­ket­ing in the tra­di­tional media. Mar­ket­ing a web­site is not a low cost or quick option in these com­pet­it­ive times for any e-tailer and is often a time and cash hungry pro­cess. Build into your budget enough money for the site’s mar­ket­ing once it’s launched and start to think about the whole mat­ter before you start to build your web­site. Tech­niques such as search engine optim­isa­tion go hand in hand with site design, so build your site with this in mind rather than be burdened with poten­tially costly site reworks after launch.
7. Unreal­istic Expect­a­tions Many small traders approach the set­ting up and ongo­ing mar­ket­ing of an e-commerce web­site with unreal­istic expect­a­tions both in terms of the time com­mit­ment needed and the ini­tial set-up costs required. Ser­i­ous e-tailers should be pre­pared to invest sev­eral thou­sand pounds in their online busi­ness and shouldn’t real­ist­ic­ally expect a return on their invest­ment in any­thing less than a year. One retailer, hav­ing spent his entire budget on get­ting his site launched, left no money for ongo­ing mar­ket­ing and couldn’t under­stand why his site wasn’t flooded with orders within the first couple of months. In their ini­tial business-plan, traders should take a long term view and work out how many products they need to sell in order to obtain a return on their invest­ment. Unreal­istic expect­a­tions will lead to dis­ap­point­ment and a lack of commitment.

Fur­ther Reading

Addi­tional art­icles on the web that will help the small retailer avoid com­mon mis­takes include:

http://econsultancy.com/blog/1997-top-10-most-common-e-commerce-mistakes

http://www.allbusiness.com/sales/internet-e-commerce/3972–1.html

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