10 Reasons Why Your Website Is Pushing Singapore Customers Away (Part 1)

As eCommerce competition heats up, it becomes apparent that successful websites have fulfilled some minimum criteria for Inbound marketing* and web design elements. If you don’t want your online business to be left in the dust, take note of the following points so you know why you are not converting more customers as you expect.

1) Poor Showcasing of Products & Services

First impression counts. You know how you are sometimes attracted to window displays of retail shops? Your website (especially the home page) is just like your window display for your visitors and customers. You have to make sure that what you are offering is showcased well and nicely, to attract potential customers or retain current customers. Without a good look and feel, you will not be able to sell well even when you have the best products out there. To achieve this, keep your site simple, sharp, easy to navigate and easy on the eyes.

2) Weak Trust Building

When customers visit your site for the first time, you cannot expect them to trust your site at a glance. Hence, the first thing you have to do, like mentioned earlier on, is to make sure your website looks professional. It is important to do so as these customers can easily go back to their search engines and look for another company with similar products or services. Next, include customer reviews and social media widgets (you can also include the number of ‘Likes’ you acquired or the number of followers you have) to let customers know that your company is active on social media platforms.

When it comes to online purchase, it is no secret that there is a high back-out rate when prospects are on the verge of payment (at the checkout stage). It is essential to have a proper payment system and present it properly to them. Customers are extremely careful and sensitive when it comes to payment as they are required to input their personal information. You should partner up with trustmark services like VeriSign, Better Business Bureau (BBB), TRUSTe, etc. and place their logos on your payment page as they can validate your website for good security and business practices.

3) Painful Navigation

Placing information on your website is good, but you have to know how to categorize, store and present the information in a way that visitors will naturally expect. If you have a messy website, your customers or prospective customers would be put off and not bother to work through the navigations to get to what they want.

Keep your site simple and clean. Excessive pop-ups and flashing banners no longer work. Personally, I’d leave the page immediately if I come across such sites. Put the effort into creating logical categories and groups, colour combination and your layout. Also, you could include a search bar on all your web pages.

4) No ‘Live’ Help

One main problem your online customers have is that they do not have a sales assistant to assist them. In physical stores, you have the sales assistant to explain the product or service to you, they answer your questions there and then, and they are able to bring you the items you want. Even if they do not have stocks for the particular product, they are able to find out which other outlet has it and make arrangements from there.

eCommerce sites definitely cannot provide a physical sales assistant for every customer. Sure, most websites already include a “Contact Us” section with contact numbers and email addresses. However, it is difficult to reply all the emails immediately and there may not be a 100% pick-up in calls due to manpower. You should look into offering ‘live’ chat, where customers are able to have their queries answered straightaway. This would position you as credible and warm, and hence your customers have more confidence in working or buying from you.

5) Inventory Issues

After hearing much about your company, your prospect arrives at your website and is eager to order something from you. They are happy to find it on your website, so it should be available. However, just when the transaction is about to be completed, they receive a pop-up or message saying, “Sorry, item is currently unavailable” or “Sorry, item is currently out of stock”. How bad an impression would that be?

Your prospect was so excited to purchase something from you but in the end, became disappointed because of a lack of up-to-date management of your eCommerce system. If it happens more than once, they’ll probably never come back to your site ever again.

The reason why this happens is because your item could be sold out on a different platform, your inventory is not updated, or there are technical errors within your system. You should use technology to your advantage, enabling the systems to be updated and make sure all of them work well together. You could also make use of inventory tracking to create urgency by showing the number of items left for a product, thereby encouraging the customer to buy immediately.

After reading through these 5 mistakes, are you guilty of not fulfilling any of them? Be sure to rectify problems and errors as soon as possible!

* Inbound Marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.

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