5 Issues Plaguing the E-Commerce Industry Right Now

As the e-commerce industry grows, these are the challenges retailers must contend with.

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Enterprise e-commerce platforms are worth millions! But if they fail to provide your business with the necessities, it could cost you a fortune. Despite the best efforts of these pioneers, the e-commerce industry is plagued by various issues.

Following, we are going to name five of them and present a viable solution for each.

1. A Slow Performing Website

Optimal Site Performance means fast page loading and instant surfing in-between pages. This affects your site speed and how easily your customer can find a product. A 100-millisecond delay in loading speed can drop your conversion rate up to 7%.

If your visitors (Desktop users) have to wait for 2 seconds, then your bounce rate jumps to 100%.  Wait, the story doesn’t end here as more than half of your mobile users will leave the site if they have to wait for more than 3 seconds.

Search Engines never favor slow websites, and Page Load Speed plays a crucial role in site ranking. If your website is slow, it won’t show up in search results for mobile users.

To improve your site’s performance, switch to a highly optimized Enterprise ecommerce platform. Choose a fast performer that can sustain high traffic (50,000 Requests every minute) while maintaining the ideal page load speed of 140-milliseconds.

2. Traffic Scalability

This is your website’s ability to scale under heavy loads. Instant increase in traffic can cripple your site’s performance. It can overwhelm your hardware and threatens your business. These cases are very common when a store advertises heavily for upcoming holiday promotion and massively increases their sales.

What happens is the side gets so many orders it fails to keep up. Orders get mixed up with inventories being oversold. Due to these issues, the store doesn’t ship in time. Such a blunder ruins the organization’s reputation and costs it big money.

You can better prepare your site for such situations with a Cloud-based SAAS (Software As a Service) solution. There are many Enterprise e-commerce solutions already available.

3. Vague Product Information

Product information with imports, updates, and maintenance need time. Users can see the product in person in traditional stores, not online. Therefore to win your client’s confidence, you need more than one product image with an elaborate product description and detailed specifications.

It takes time to take snaps, write the description and specifications, adding the product and advertising it. This is time-consuming but crucial to convince your users to buy from you.

Now get the big picture, if your website has over 20,000 products, this translates to thousands of hours of work or a whole year’s worth of work days. To catalog the products, you need tens or hundred employees working for months just to post these products.

The story doesn’t end here; you will update 10-30% of your products every year. Product information and maintenance can make or break your business until you find an automation solution.

To take care of this, you need Enterprise e-commerce software with cutting-edge application program interface (API). API lets you send product information from Product Information Management or Resource Planning to the website without delaying data entry.

4. Security Loopholes

When someone shops from you, they trust you with their confidential information like credit card number. Your customers do this because they believe you will keep this information safe. As a business, you are responsible for keeping their information safe, and if you fail to do it, people won’t trust you.

Therefore, you need to do everything in your power to keep your site safe against a data breach. Data Breach is the worst thing that can happen to an e-commerce store, they compromise your records, and costs you a fortune.

Therefore, use Level 1 PCI DDS certificates and complaints to keep yourself and your users safe. This certificate shows you care about your buyers and implemented the best security measures to keep them safe.

5. Optimize for Mobile

It’s a common negligence that plagues many e-commerce businesses.  You did everything to make your business successfully, then why don’t you optimize it for mobile users. According to an estimate, half of the retail sales will come via mobile users by 2020.

Therefore, you have to optimize for mobile users to stay competitive but remember not all Shopify e-commerce platforms are compatible with mobile interfaces. So, do your research and find the option that suits you best.

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About the author

jenniferscott2343@gmail.com'
Jennifer Scott
Jennifer Scott is a freelance finance writer who’s always looking for a way to save money on her path to FIRE.

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