5 Mistakes Ecommerce International Sellers make.
There is a famous saying, “Fools learn from their mistake, whereas wise learn from the mistakes of others.”
According to federal government data, International sellers typically outperform those who sell domestically. Hackernoon researched that Global Ecommerce sales in 2016 was 1.859 Trillion USD.
Statista's information says that in 2017, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 2.3 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are estimated to grow to 4.88 trillion USD till 2021.
If you’re reading this, it probably means you have taken the initiative to sell your product globally, but maybe you are not making the figures, profit, revenue, sales that you had made up in your mind at the first place.
Remember every mistake you make on an E-commerce platform will cost you trustworthy customers, as well as, a huge amount of money.
Let’s quickly go through the following Ecommerce mistakes that websites tend to make and also know how to avoid them:
1) Not Creating Buyer Persona
Imagine you’ve invited a new friend over for dinner. Which of the following processes would be more efficient? Making a sandwich and then asking your friend if he/she has got any food allergies as you place the attractively plated sandwich in front or vice versa?
Unless if you’re prepared to throw away the whole deliciously made sandwich when the friend tells you that they’re extremely allergic to bread, the answer should be pretty obvious.
Similarly, it is happening in the digital world. Many e-commerce websites are just selling their products online without even doing a tiny research of what their potential/targeted customers are.
If you start building an online brand without even knowing who your customers are, then you’re probably going to have a tough time and wastage of money, which could have been saved if you had created and referenced your buyer personas.
2) Running more than 1 online stores
Maybe you are already running multiple e-commerce stores for selling in different geographic. Maintaining more than a single store can be niggling, and time-consuming.
Merchants usually create multiple online stores to sell beyond their border and to reach a more international audience. But while doing this they overlook the cost they’re spending for maintaining the store, manpower utilized, because of which they won’t be able to focus on their niche customers and starts losing sales.
If you’re running your store on Shopify and still handling more than 1 store for International selling, then you are doing it wrong.
That’s fine if you want your customers/visitors to see the products/items pricing in their local currency, but creating a different store for the same is not a good practice.
An app named “Multi-Country Pricing” helps you to set different prices for different countries and that too without opening a new Shopify store.
Not only this if you want to show less or no shipping rates for your targeted areas, the app will allow you to set/include the shipping rates or extra charges in the base price of the product itself. So your customers would feel that your store is localized one thus the shipping charges are zero.
3) One/Blurred Product Image
Yes, that is one of the primary reason that your customers are not likely to buy a product just because they see only 1 visual image of the product.
Not only International but your Domestic online visitors are also always desperate to see the product’s multiple images from different angles and in different colors. And if you fail to offer them this flexibility then you’ll only see the graph of your sales/profit going towards the X-axis.
Your online store has all the products that your potential buyers are ready to buy but they can't see the product properly and the reason behind this may be many :
- Too small image
- Blurry Image
- No zooming functionality
- Bad color background
- Clicked Angles are not proper
- Low light image
- Flashy Image
Thus you need to have a professional photo shoot of the products before you decide to display the product on the online store.
4) Choosing the wrong E-commerce Platform
Most critical part comes while choosing the platform, where you want more sales by delighting your online shoppers and eventually establishing your own brand. However, many of them finds it difficult to delight as they chose their platform off beam.
As an online store runner, you need to do some market research regarding which platform suits their needs and sales. It happens that the platform you chose/use may not be the best place to sell the product in some other International regions.
E-commerce giants like Alibaba, Myntra, Tencent and Snapdeal lead the Asian e-commerce but a lot of Western retail capitalists aren’t familiar with these platforms.
Different geographic locations have different market needs and expectations. Factor by which your customers of one region is pleased may not appeal customers of another locality.
Using an online platform like Shopify which constantly keeps updating their services to react and evolve with international consumer’s behavior, trends, and technology innovation is something you must hunt.
5) Checkout only in “Single Currency”
Finally, your international (potential) customer has added all the desired product in the shopping cart and now they are ready for the checkout.
After filling all the necessary details they find that your online store doesn’t supports/shows their native currency in which they were going to make the payment. Thus unwillingly they just abandon the shopping cart.
According to Shopify’s data :
- 92% of the online buyers don’t purchase from the site that does not offers to make payment in their native currency.
- 33% are likely to abandon the purchase if the pricing is only in US dollar.
Offering your buyers to checkout in multiple currency can largely increase your international sales. Eventually you will also gain an invaluable amount of trust form your online buyers by allowing them to pay in their native currency.
If you’re Shopify user then an app named “Multi Currency Checkout” will automatically detect the location from where your store is being accessed and then accordingly show prices to your buyers for the checkout.
Wrapping it up
There is no harm making mistakes, the only harm is when you repeat the same mistakes again. Learn from it, evolve from it, don’t be afraid to take risks.
Make yourself and your online store organized, equipped and complete so that errors are minimized to zero and the productivity of your store is maximized to two zeroes followed by “one”.
