Challenges of eCommerce: Everything You Need to Know

What are the challenges of eCommerce? An eCommerce store is the primary retail growth engine for any business. The meteoric growth witnessed by digital commerce over the last decade has also given rise to several go eCommerce challenges. eCommerce is expected to claim 17% of the industry by the end of 2022. With this increasing size and demand for online business, riding the digital commerce wave is not easy.

The majority of shoppers, almost 81%, begin their journey with online research, and 71% of the customers say that a fast and highly responsive online marketplace is essential for a pleasant shopping experience.

The Total Transaction Value (TTV) in the digital commerce segment was reported to have a worth of 3.7M USD in 2020, and it is expected to rise, hitting 4.5M USD by 2023. However, to achieve a competitive edge in this crowded marketplace, leaders must first address the core challenges facing the eCommerce businesses.

Read also: Which Online Business Platform Malaysia is Best for Selling?

What are The Challenges Involved in Launching an eCommerce Platform?

Leaders across the globe face a lot of eCommerce business problems while adapting to the digital commerce business. Here are the most common eCommerce challenges and solutions while working towards building a successful eCommerce platform.

Capitalization of Data

The expansion of the digital commerce function to become a part of the holistic brand solution is one of the crucial eCommerce challenges. 

Quite often eCommerce becomes an autonomous side business. To facilitate this union, businesses are working hard towards building eCommerce solutions that are data enabled and help them right from shipping to store management, omnichannel solutions like BOPIS, and new Key Performance Integrals (KPIs) beyond conversion rates and Average Order Values (AOV).

Rather than experimenting based on assumed market trends, data needs to be systematically captured and applied in innovative ways. A few entrepreneurs realize the impact of data on the day-to-day as well as long term business decisions.

Solution

Retail businesses should start by making the eCommerce function an integral part of the business rather than a separate segment of a brand solution. They should find smart ways to capture and measure data related to in-store shopping and customer loyalty. It will help them in the data visualization, targeting the customers better, making a cross-digital impact, and improving monetization methods in local stores.

Customers Exploding Expectation

Retailers all over the world are continuously trying to build their reputation and a sharp brand image with the promise of a great experience. 

In an era where experience matters the most and tech giants like amazon are taking the online buying process to the proverbial next level with anticipatory shipping methods, it is very difficult to meet customer expectations. Thus, competing with them and fulfilling the ever-evolving customer demand is a huge challenge for retailers today.

Solution 

To meet the customer expectation of good user experience, brands should start analyzing their eCommerce trends and must focus on using it to come up with personalized customer experiences. Your customers must feel acknowledged and valued right from the moment they start using your service. Send them notification alerts or product updates for the same.

Agility Challenge

Agility is the capability of a business to introduce advancements, develop and deploy digital content, react to seasonal changes, etc. agility drives immediate digital fulfillment, and it is identified as one of the most important initiatives in the ecommerce business. Agile transformation is at the heart of digital business, and scaling is essential for making it successful.

A large number of companies find it difficult to move or change quickly as per the needs of customers. It is usually because they can’t integrate new technologies efficiently with their existing system, and as a result of which, penetration into the market gets harder.

Solution 

Being agile in the eCommerce approach helps you deliver an enhanced shopping experience. To be agile, eCommerce businesses need to incorporate quick changes across all platforms and must create personalized collections that inspire customers. They should keep transporting fresh content and must design it separately for all devices and media channels along with guide selling experiences.

Personalization Approach

There is no denying that personalization is the key factor responsible for good customer experience. Retailers are obsessed with providing their customers with a personalized experience that sometimes gets over personalized without them noticing it. And customers get irked by an excessive amount of targeted online ads.

In this hustle, retailers miss out on developing a one-to-one relationship with the customers, and it turns into a major challenge in front of them. 84% of customers refer to being treated like a person and not just a number as an integral part of winning their business.

Solution 

eCommerce business leaders must focus on developing the 1:1 relationship with their customers. They need to strengthen their tools and capabilities for a better reach and visibility amongst the consumers. Retailers should use additional customer data strategically to better understand individual customer behavior and curate personalized customer experience.

Being Consistent

Consistency is the most critical element while building a successful omnichannel strategy. Customers use multiple platforms to search for items before making a decision which binds businesses to provide seamless purchasing encounters through every product or service offered by them.

Solution 

Brands can go about optimizing their online platforms to deliver complete consistency between search options, various shopping pages, and shipping details. It will help them make the shopping experience seamless for the shoppers. They should work on product quality, fulfillment, and distribution as well.

Data Security

The uptake of eCommerce also brings along associated eCommerce challenges, security threat being one of the most critical of them. There is a looming threat of hackers and fraudsters attacking the host server and not just stealing confidential data but also being infected with viruses.

Breach of credit and debit card details has become common news, and such lapses directly affect the trust of a customer. Phishing is yet another threat where hackers pose as businesses and ask for sensitive information from their customers. Several users are increasingly concerned about the eCommerce website’s capability to effectively shield their personal identity as well as the security of the transaction details.

Solution 

Security first approach has to be a priority for every business operating in the digital space to retain the reputation of the brand and attract frequent customers. Some steps to safeguard the data of the business and its customers include switching to HTTPS protocols, using credible third party payment processing systems as well as obtaining a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) accreditation.

What are The Barriers of eCommerce?

Startups are still hampering their chances of success by ignoring the basics. It’s tempting to think that an awesome product, buckets of self-belief and dawn-to-dusk toil are enough to set your virtual cash registers on fire.

But you’d be surprised how many entrepreneurs struggle to get past the startup business challenges. Here are six barriers that can inhibit growth in the world of eCommerce.

Not Doing the Groundwork

You’ve come up with a great product that’s going to enrich the lives of millions. Before you run the mega-bucks ad campaign, the least you can do is make sure your idea wasn’t invented years ago.

It’s unique? That’s good, but now you have to do more in depth research about your likely customers who and where they are, what they’d be prepared to pay for your product, what they currently use instead, how they’re likely to perceive your brand and message, how you’ll cope with unexpectedly high demand for removing the disadvantage for your eCommerce business.

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Assuming That Customers Will Rush to your Store

It’s also important to get the message right for each channel. What works well on Instagram may not resonate with Twitter audiences, and a completely different approach will undoubtedly be needed for email digital marketing.

Next, you want to convert them into paying customers. Finally, remember that your best customers are generally your existing customers, so develop a marketing program aimed at securing repeat custom from satisfied shoppers.

Not Choosing the Right People

Go e commerce is no different to any other endeavor, in that the people you bring into your company are either going to be in tune with what you’re doing and will help you realize your goals or, well, they won’t.

Failing to Get The Words Right

As an eCommerce business owner, communication is at the heart of everything you do. Every word that is on, comes from or is related to your website, has to work to help your business succeed.

Emails must be persuasive, social content engaging, product descriptions compelling. Don’t ignore the minutiae, the buttons, captions, links and calls to action are what you’re depending on to turn browsers into shoppers. It helps to think about what you call yourself too.

Think you can let your guard down on forums and social media? Not a chance. These are hothouses for misunderstanding and PR disaster, and many a brand’s attempts at humor or topicality on Social Media have backfired massively.

Ignoring People on The Move

The latest figures show that visits to retail websites via mobile devices have overtaken desktop traffic for the first time, with smartphones and tablets accounting for more than 26% of conversions. That figure is headed in one direction only.

So having your online store optimized for mobile is increasingly important. So, to create a superior mobile experience for your customers 46% of mobile shoppers will abandon a website if it doesn’t load within 20 seconds, while 16% won’t give it more than five seconds before looking elsewhere.

Not Recognizing The Value of Social Proof

The power of social proof is knowing that other people have bought and are satisfied with your products gives new customers the confidence to try it for themselves. The important thing is that it’s there to be found. If you don’t leverage the power of social proof, you’re likely to turn away the 47% of consumers who check reviews while on a brand’s website before adding anything to their cart.

Conclusion 

By reading this article, you already know the advantages and disadvantages of e-commerce. Managing your own ecommerce business, you may have already encountered some of these challenges while some others may be around the bend.

However, as we’ve shown with some actionable tips, there are lasting solutions for each of them.

What is e commerce business websites require is a much greater deal of optimization to account for the technical side of things and also the improvement in spheres of marketing, content, and especially customer services.

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