Why Your Online Business Isn’t Doing Well

Featured article by Jeremy Sutter, Independent Technology Author

Selling products or services online allows you to reach a larger audience while reducing the cost of your business’s overhead in the process. According to research cited by TechCrunch, 79 percent of U.S. consumers shop online. By taking your business online, you’ll experience greater sales.

It takes more than just a basic website to succeed online, however. Many businesses launch a website, believing that it will immediately drive sales. It’s only later when they realize that more work is needed to create a successful online business. To increase your business’s chance of online success, you should familiarize yourself with the following mistakes and how to avoid them.

Selling Too Many Different Products or Services

What’s wrong with selling a variety of products or services online? Well, it’s perfectly fine to sell multiple products or services if they are related, but projecting your business as the next Amazon or Walmart.com is going to end well. Selling everything from gardening tools and auto parts to jewelry and TVs doesn’t help customers remember your business. To attract customers to your online business, you must focus on a niche. As explained by Entrepreneur, developing your business around a specific niche will help you break into the market.

Neglecting to Optimize Site Speed

Site speed is particularly important for online retailers. If you have an ecommerce website, long load times will discourage visitors from staying on your site. And each visitor who leaves is a missed sales opportunity. Amazon conducted a study on the correlation between site speed and ecommerce sales. The online retailing giant found that every 100ms visitors were forced to wait resulted in 1 percent lower sales. To prevent this from happening to your online business, optimize your site so that it loads quickly for all visitors.

Broken Elements

Another common mistake online businesses make is failing to identify and fix broken elements on their website. If your website has a broken link, for instance, visitors will see an error page instead of the page that you had intended them to see. And if it’s a add-to-cart or checkout link, that means lost revenue for your business. Thankfully, there’s a quick and easy way to find broken links on your business’s site. BrokenLinkCheck.com will scan your site, revealing the URL of all broken links.

Overlooking Reviews and Ratings

Once your online business develops some traffic, customers will begin to rate and review it. You may discover these reviews posted on channels like Facebook, Google, Yelp and Angie’s List. Rather than ignoring your customers’ feedback, you should monitor it so that you’ll know exactly how customers feel about your business. If a customer isn’t happy with his or her purchase, reading a review will help you understand the reasoning for his or her dissatisfaction. Ignoring these reviews and ratings will only prevent you from improving your online business.

Poor Financial Planning

Running an online business costs money, and it’s important that you plan for these expenses ahead of time. At the bare minimum, you’ll need a domain name and web hosting service. The domain name is the visible text of your site’s address whereas the web hosting service is responsible for storing and serving your site’s files to visitors. Of course, you’ll probably encounter other expenses when running an online business as well, including professional web design, advertising, premium plugins or add-ons and more.

Using the internet, you’ll have an easier time scaling your business and expanding its reach. However, you should avoid the mistakes listed here. Whether it’s selling too many different products, neglecting to optimize site speed, including broken elements on your site, overlooking reviews or poor financial planning, these are all serious mistakes that can jeopardize your business’s chance of success.