The Common Challenges in Online Business (And how to Tackle Them)

Everyone is talking about setting up an online shop nowadays. We cannot deny the benefits that it could bring to these new generations of businesses. Not only the scale that it promises, but also provides solutions for issues that faces regular brick-and-mortar business.

However, developing an online store comes with a few challenges... In this content, we are going to discuss the Top 5 Challenges that online retailers’ face and our own suggestions.

1. Getting Attention

As an online business, traffic to your store is a must and you have to compete with millions of online retailers to get the attention. This is a new challenge for traditional merchants, competitions from everyone, not only from the business next door.

Getting attention is not as easy as placing an advertisement board outside your store, as there are new strategies needed to attract the attention of online visitors to come to your online store.

The latest strategies encompass online advertising, SEM, SEO, and other marketing tools that will help visitors to visit your store.

2. Build Trust

Building trust is extremely hard. Whether you are on a brick-and-mortar or an online business, building trusts is never an easy thing for any company. Trust brings goodwill for a business, which is critical for any company that wants to last long.

Trust comes from emotional relationship between you and your customers. Although it sounds hard, there may be some small steps that you can do to build trust.

Make sure you have a verified and trustworthy payment gateway, so that your customers can checkout easily and safely. According to recent research, a lot of the doubts on online business come from inefficient and inconvenient checkout. By eliminating these doubts, you will be able to find the trust needed by customers.

3. Identifying the Mistakes

Hey, every business has its own mistakes. Learning from your mistakes should be something standard, but this is not the case for many companies, thus refraining them from growing.

So, how do you exactly identify your mistake? You need to make sure to track customer’s behavior and demographic. Keep optimizing and do testing all the time to see which content that works better. Reading these metrics will give you the opportunity to test the parts that wasn’t dealt well.

4. Converting Visitors to Customers

There are a lot of factors that affect your rate of conversion from visitors to customers, namely:

• Speed of site
• Easy directions
• Clear product information
• Quick checkout process

There are more factors that may help convert online visitors to customers. Although it may seem simple, the process would take a significant amount of resources such as time and funds. Once your site has all the components mentioned above, you would be ready to convert these site visitors to paying customers.

5. Retaining Customers

Another challenge that online retailers face (also in the case of traditional retailers) is retaining customers after they are converted from visitors. It is safe to say that this is the last crucial step you need to analyze and review to know where the business is heading.

There are plenty of sites that can help you analyze the number of new member versus leaving members, like www.kissmetrics.com . Alternatively, you could track members that are not active and compare it with new members that have registered with your site per month. Ultimately, you will know whether there are more members joining or leaving your site.

There are multiple ways of retaining customers, but customer service plays a huge role in the most part. In its outer shell, customer service means responding to emails, calls, or even review from our customers timely.

Not only that it makes them feel special, the customers may even share this goodwill to another person. Yeay! Free marketing for you...

Last but not the least; remember not to promise anything that you cannot fulfill to your customers. This is hazardous for your business in the long run.

Despite the fact that online capability provides retailers with limitless scalability as well as 24/7 services for customers, it has its own downfall. However, once you tackle these challenges, you would be able to start reaping the benefits of being in an online business.