Four Common E-Commerce Mistakes

In order to sell more HME products, you need to make sure that your website makes a buyer’s shopping experience a joy, not a bad dream. Shop your website as if you were the customer, and evaluate it from top to bottom. Whether you built your own website, worked with a website provider or are considering launching your first site due to competitive bidding, learn about four of the most common 
e-commerce mistakes that result in a high rate of shopping cart abandonment and lost sales. Speed—The ideal load time for a website is less than three seconds. However, a recent report clocked the average retail website load time at more than seven seconds. The drag is attributed to the usual suspects—large images, HTML, CSS and JavaScript files (website code). Other factors that can impact website load time include third-party plug-ins such as Facebook and Twitter widgets, ad network tracking scripts and cloud-based content delivery systems (CDN). If you don’t provide speed and ease for consumers using your site, they will simply move on to a competitor’s site. Think about it. Do you wait for a website to load for more than a few seconds before trying a different site? According to Gomez by Compuware, every two seconds of load time on your site equals an 8 percent abandonment rate. The same study also showed that if your site load time drops from eight seconds to two seconds, your conversion rate actually jumps by 74 percent. It’s no wonder load time greatly impacts your bottom line. Test your site with the cool free tool from Pingdom, tools.pingdom.com/fpt. You may be surprised by the results. Pingdom provides a detailed, 
actionable report of the load time for every single page of your website. Armed with that information, it’s up to you 
to make any necessary changes to decrease 
your load time and improve sales 
conversions. Based on the statistics 
above, you can’t afford not to make sure your site is up to par. Browser—Do your website visitors have the same experience on your website regardless of which browser they use? To find out, try accessing your website 
using a number of web browsers, including Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Viewing your site this way, you’ll see exactly what buyers see. Are the product images displaying properly? Is all of your content, including any how-to videos, loading correctly? Is the shopping cart experience flawless? Here again, it’s up to you to take control and resolve any issues you uncover. Because most of us naturally assume the entire world uses the same web browser that we do, going through this exercise is especially important. Are you still using Internet Explorer (IE)? If so, with only 11.8 percent of the population using IE as of July 2013, then you are part of the minority. The far and away leader is now Google Chrome at 52.8 percent. Security—Today’s HME customers are savvy. They’re aware of fraudulent websites that exist to trick consumers into providing credit card information for illegal use. Here are three ways you can show that your website is fully secure and their personal information is safe.

• All pages that collect personal information should be secured with a Secured Socket Layer certificate (SSL) that automatically displays the pages in the address bar preceded by https://.
• A small lock icon should display in the address bar in browser windows on secured pages. This icon is clickable to view the site’s SSL issuer, type and expiration date.
• Prominently display the shield icon or logo of your SSL provider on your home page to provide your site shoppers an added visual reassurance of your website security.

Checkout—You’ve done everything right, and visitors are adding items to your site’s shopping cart. But for some reason, not every buyer clicks to purchase. E-commerce sites have an average cart abandonment rate of 55 to 75 percent. Be sure that your shopping cart is optimized to make the buying experience as quick and simple as possible, while removing any unnecessary steps and barriers to improve conversion rate. Follow these shopping cart best practices.

• Offer a simple, visual experience at all times. There’s nothing more frustrating than backtracking or scouring a site to hunt down your shopping cart.
• The cart and its contents, including item thumbnails of the equipment, should be easy to access at all times so that online buyers can quickly double-check features, quantities and costs—no matter what page they’re on.
• Only ask for the minimum essential information—name, billing and shipping addresses and credit card information.
• Simplify the amount of information on any given page to avoid sensory overload.
• Address potential objections—shipping charges, return policy, price guarantee—before they happen. Prominently display a satisfaction guaranteed symbol.
• Make it easy to find the contact 
information for your customer service group to answer any questions.

When you identify customer frustration in your brick-and-mortar store, you are sure to fix it, right? You need to have the same business philosophy about your website functionality. Take some time to self-evaluate and ask others to evaluate your website performance, compatibility with web browsers, security and shopping cart optimization to be sure you’re welcoming customers instead of shooing them away to your competitors.