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Mistakes at the planning stage of an e-commerce project can reduce its chances of success. Here are some of the key issues you need to consider when selling online.

Set realistic targets

It's important to set measurable, achievable goals:

• Set clear goals - for example, to bring in new customers, increase sales, or reduce per-sale costs.
• Agree specific, measurable objectives such as a percentage increase in sales or new customers.
• Ensure your targets are realistic and achievable.

Have a clear business focus

Make sure your e-commerce strategy is in line with your business strategy:

• Pursue new opportunities offered by e-commerce, but stay focused on what your business is actually about.
• Understand how e-commerce will integrate with your overall business objectives. Will it increase sales or improve margins? Be clear on how e-commerce adds value to your business.
• If e-commerce is causing conflicts in your operation, re-examine your goals. Rethink how e-commerce can fit into your business strategy.

Don't overlook the hidden costs

Take note of all the costs involved:

• Look at the total cost of ownership, including hardware, software, hosting, training, services, maintenance and 91香蕉黄色视频, upgrades, marketing and communications and administration.
• Understand the effect of increased sales - how are you going to process and dispatch orders? Will you have the capacity if sales take off or will you need to invest in additional resources or staff?
• Understand your postage and shipping costs - identify where you will ship to and where you won't. Have a clear pricing policy for shipping - 'Free postage' is great, but only to certain locations.
• Be realistic about likely costs from the start and ensure you keep your budget under control.
• Understand the cost of customer returns, especially if you are offering free returns.
• Keep a close watch on online marketing costs. Every sale will include some costs from online marketing (paid ads, social media campaigns, SEO). Monitor these costs to ensure the profitability of each of your product lines.

Consider the site specification

Use a specification to ensure the new system will be fit for purpose:

• Draw up a site specification identifying what you are trying to achieve and how various components of the site contribute to this.
• Build reliability and scalability into the solution from the start to ensure your site can grow in line with your business.
• Make your website simple to update so you can add content quickly and easily.
• Don't view your e-commerce solution in isolation. Ensure you integrate it with your main corporate systems and overall IT strategy.

One of the key factors in the success of your e-commerce site is its ease of use. Make sure you consider these important issues.

Don't over-design the site

Use effective, simple design:

• Create a common theme of colours, fonts, graphics and page layouts. You can achieve this without needing spectacular graphics.
• Keep the screen uncluttered - make good use of space. Only use effects that add value for the user.

Consider download speeds

Avoid slowing your site down:

• Download times are key - users expect pages to load in less than two seconds. The slower the load time, the less completed sales you can expect. If your site is running slowly, consider upgrading it.
• Remove large images, graphics or animation from key pages, if download speeds are slow.

Support multiple browsers

Check your site will work across various browsers:

• Design web pages that can be displayed by different browsers. Common browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.
• Test your web pages with different browsers to confirm they display properly.

Be mobile-friendly

More than half of online traffic come from mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Make sure your site works on mobile:

• Designing a responsive site or separate mobile version to make your website fit any screen, including smartphones and tablets. See mobile web design best practice .
• Mobile-friendliness also impacts how search engines rank your site. Check for any issues with . 

Don't underestimate the importance of usability

User experience is key to good website design: 

• Ensure navigation buttons are clearly presented and the words or images behind these links are clear, concise and relevant to the information they are leading to.
• Include a site map and a search facility to help users locate the required information.
• Take account of the 'three-click rule' so users starting at your home page can get to the required information in three mouse clicks.
• Have a good functional search box allowing customs to enter items they are looking for. Test this functionality to ensure customers' results are useful and accurate.

Get feedback on usability

Many e-commerce operators don't get usability feedback from anyone beyond the development team. Consider getting an outside perspective. Ask employees not involved in the design, a focus group, or your spouses or friends. This can be crucial to the site's development and performance.

Ensure you get feedback before the full launch of the site. Once it is launched any problems will be highly visible to both your customers and competitors.

First impressions are important. The quality of the content on your site can help create an immediate impression and also ensure that customers keep returning.

Ensure information is accurate

Avoid inaccurate information and broken links:

• Out-of-date or incorrect information will put off your customers.
• Make sure information is accurate, especially prices, and monitor the information regularly.
• Make sure that all images display properly, are accurate and show products in their best light.
• Put your contact details, including phone numbers, email and postal addresses, or a prominent link to them, on the home page.

Make the content easy to read

Ensure users can easily read your content:

• Ensure text is easy to read - use plain English that is easy to understand.
• Break text up with headings and bullet points. Remember also that English is a second language for many potential customers.
• Provide users with a clear description of the product. Ensure they have enough information to make an informed decision.

Keep content fresh and interesting

• People expect websites to be updated on a regular basis. If your website is static, users have little reason to return. You may lose chances to promote new products or services. Think about how you can engage with your customers using new technology. See creating content for marketing campaigns.
• If you have a news section or announcements about new products then they should reflect the current situation. New content will also help your website with its search engine optimisation.
• Update the notice stating when the site was last updated, if you have one.
• Ask your web designer to add a tool that will recognise newly added products and most popular products, and display them automatically on your homepage.

Check the links on your site

Make sure all your links work correctly:

• Regularly check internal links on your site. If they don't work, or a page has been removed, it reflects very poorly on your site.
• Users like links to other sites, so you should consider providing them. However, if there are too many links, or they appear too soon, you risk losing customers.

Marketing is all about promoting and selling your goods and services. You need to attract the attention of potential customers to convince them to purchase your products or services, and to turn first-time purchasers into repeat customers.

No matter how good your site is, if people don't know about it they will not visit it. So, you need to consider various marketing strategies.

Develop a marketing plan

• No matter what marketing medium you are using, if you want to attract new and existing customers to your site you must have a solid marketing plan.
• Give people a reason to return to your site, such as news, product launches or promotions.
• Identify the target markets you plan to address and profile each market so you pitch your benefits at the correct level.
• Ensure your marketing budget is realistic and is capable of funding all the activities you plan to undertake.
• You should justify your marketing spend by the levels of sales you expect to generate.

Use the most appropriate marketing techniques

Choose the right tactics:

• Select the most appropriate online and offline marketing techniques for your particular needs.
• Ensure your marketing campaign does not annoy or antagonise the customer. Excessive spam following a purchase is a common complaint among e-commerce shoppers. See email marketing for best practice advice. 

Measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts

Monitor how well your campaigns are doing:

• Measure your success, or otherwise, of your marketing initiative. This can help show what works and what doesn't.
• Use tracking and site analysis tools to tell you more about your site visitors - where they came from, what they did on your site (for example whether they purchased anything and what keywords they used), and where they went when they left.

Your checkout procedure must be as quick and simple as possible. Research shows that online retailers can see up to an 80% cart abandonment rate (source: Barilliance, 2018). . Here are some of the techniques that you can employ.

Ensure there are no surprises

Be upfront about the process and costs:

• Provide details of delivery costs early in the process, so customers are not surprised during final checkout. Consider providing alternative options such as express delivery or in-store collection.
• Show stock availability on the product page, so customers know immediately if a product is in stock.
• Explain the buying process - how long it will take and how many stages there are.

Make it easy to select and amend orders

Let users adjust their order as necessary:

• Include a link from the shopping cart back to the product page, so customers can easily check they have selected the right item.
• Make it straightforward to change quantities or delete an item from the shopping cart.
• If a product comes in multiple sizes or colours, make it easy for the customer to select or change values in the shopping cart.

Indicate customer progress

Be clear about how long the purchase will take:

• Make sure that the customer always knows at exactly what stage they are in the checkout process by including an indicator, for example 'You are in step 3 of 4'.
• To prevent customers from getting lost, add a 'Next Step' or 'Continue with Checkout' button on each checkout page.

Show clear information

Make sure users understand everything they need to know:

• Keep all information on a single screen on each checkout page, so customers do not have to frequently scroll down.
• Include a box that customers can tick to automatically select the billing address as the delivery address.
• If information is missing or filled out incorrectly, give a clear error message that describes what to fix.

Many e-commerce customer complaints are about order fulfilment. To tackle such problems, you need to address various issues.

Product delivery problems

Troubleshoot potential delivery issues:

• Only promise what you can realistically deliver, especially when demand is high.
• If you use a third-party delivery service for your e-commerce site, choose it very carefully.
• Avoid luring customers by offering a product at low cost whilst charging a relatively high delivery rate. This practice rarely works and is more likely to cause problems in customer relations.
• Ensure your packaging is robust enough to make a safe delivery.

Failing to keep the customer updated on progress

Provide regular information:

• Make a point of confirming orders as soon as possible. Customers have the right to a written order confirmation under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. They can be generated automatically via email and are expected by most customers. Read more about selling online and the law.
• Provide customers with a way to track the progress and availability of their order. Many carriers now send an email to confirm an order's dispatch. Others use online tracking systems that let customers check progress.

Having an acceptable returns policy

Put a reasonable returns policy in place:

• Set up an acceptable way to handle customer returns and make sure to resolve any customer dissatisfaction professionally. 
• Consider a 100% money-back guarantee if customers don't like or want the product.

You should put in place measures to protect your systems and data against theft and hackers. There are a variety of ways in which misuse of information and hacker attacks could jeopardise your business, so security must be at the forefront of your e-commerce plans.

Poor security may cause customers to lose trust or your e-commerce site to go down.

If you already have a merchant account set up, secure socket layer (SSL) technology is used to encrypt transaction data and to send customer and card details to the acquiring bank for authorisation. You should ensure any web hosting solution you consider is capable of 91香蕉黄色视频ing the SSL protocol.

Hackers gaining access to privileged information

Be sure to protect confidential information: 

• Weak security can let hackers access your sensitive business data, like price lists, catalogues, and valuable intellectual property. The motives may be malicious or to gain competitive knowledge.
• Hackers may also gain access to the financial information of your business or your customers, with a view to committing fraud.

Loss of customer confidence

Your customers expect you to make security a priority:

• Security breaches can damage the confidence that your customers have in your e-commerce service.
• A lack of customer confidence is potentially fatal to the success of your online venture.

Denial-of-service attacks

Denial-of-service attacks block access to a website's users. They force the site to reduce its service or shut down. Some businesses never recover from such attacks.

No contingency measures in place

Plan for potential threats:

• There are many possible threats to your e-commerce system, both malicious and natural. Consider the most likely risks and take steps to minimise them, such as virus software, password protection and firewalls.
• Contingency planning puts measures in place that enable your systems to continue operating in a crisis.
• Consider how your own systems would continue to operate in the event of a denial-of-service attack or security breach and the likely effect that this would have on your business.