Please avoid these adverse e-commerce practices if you want your online sales to skyrocket.
Every e-commerce business owner wants to increase online sales, bring in extra cash flow, and create more revenue. Still, many e-commerce stores make a number of widespread mistakes that actually block their businesses from growing online sales. This article will help you identify the possible pitfalls in running your e-commerce business and provide advice on how to avoid them and sell online successfully.
Contents:
5 e-commerce store mistakes that block an increase in online sales
1. Increase online sales without e-commerce software backup
2. Sell online without inventory tracking and inventory management
3. Give your online store customers limited payment options
4. Hide or censor online store reviews
5. Be unprepared for returns and refunds when selling online
How to increase online sales and avoid e-commerce business mistakes
1. Choose the right e-commerce accounting software
2. Expand sales channels to make your e-commerce business thrive
3. Track e-commerce business expenses: fees, shipping, and refunds
4. Streamline inventory tracking to sell online successfully
5. Let e-commerce accounting software calculate online sales taxes
5 e-commerce store mistakes that block an increase in online sales
Everyone who runs a business makes mistakes. But not everyone learns from them! That is what distinguishes successful entrepreneurs. If you want your online store to succeed, you need to elicit what hinders your growth and change it. The sooner you pinpoint the weaknesses of your e-commerce business, the sooner you will bring in the necessary changes to increase online sales.
Here are 5 proven ways to fail your e-commerce businesses online sales:
Trying to increase online sales without providing a robust technological backup with proper e-commerce automation software.
Consistently selling online without inventory tracking and inventory management strategies.
Offering a limited amount of payment options and sales channels to the clients of your e-commerce store
Continuing to push and increase online sales while ignoring or hiding honest online store reviews and real customers’ feedback.
Being unprepared for returns and refunds when increasing online sales.
If you have recognized your actions in this list, please read the article carefully. It will help you better understand why such actions block online sales from rising and give directions on how to avoid making them in the future. Save it to your read-list and share it with your friends on social media to prevent other online store owners from potential failure.
Let’s get a closer look at each damaging practice and understand why a successful e-commerce business should never do this.
Mistake 1: Increase online sales without e-commerce software backup
If you want to know how to sell online successfully, implementing the right automation software will be the first answer. Selling online without proper automation software for e-commerce is a dead-end decision. You will not be able to successfully increase online sales without the automation tools that safely execute and process dozens, hundreds, or thousands of ongoing sales simultaneously.
Mistake 2: Sell online without inventory tracking and inventory management
Don’t celebrate too early if your goods sell out in minutes. If it’s not a part of a limited offer or a flash sales plan, it’s a sign of a poor inventory management strategy. The same applies to the opposite situation. When you overstock your online store with goods, you may lose control over the demand and run short of money to make a settlement with the vendor or purchase new items.
Few things can be more frustrating to online shoppers than inventory discrepancies. Remember how oversaturated the online sales market is. E-commerce stores can easily lose customers if the items customers want to buy are not available with the soonest shipping.
Mistake 3: Give your online store customers limited payment options
If you don’t provide your online store visitors with alternatives to pay in any way convenient to them, you are losing customers, and your sales will decrease.
A successful e-commerce business integrates a variety of payment options and constantly keeps expanding the range. Otherwise, clients will easily find another online store that provides more sales channels and payment options.
Mistake 4: Hide or censor online store reviews
Many e-commerce business owners are afraid of displaying online store reviews from real people on their sites and social media. Nothing can be perfect, but trying to hide the customers’ feedback is not the right strategy if you want to increase online sales.
This study reveals 60% of online shoppers would stop buying from e-commerce platforms if they knew that they were censoring reviews. Other researches state 86% of customers are more likely to shop at a store that responds to online reviews.
So, it will be hard to grow online sales while trying to escape from undesirable customer reviews. A better strategy for any e-commerce store would be to show how much your business cares about its customers and is willing to improve.
Mistake 5: Be unprepared for returns and refunds when selling online
Selling online has many pitfalls for those who come into the e-commerce business unprepared. One of them is returns and refunds. The increase in sales makes online stores susceptible to a tidal wave of returns. It’s a common practice for online shoppers to return purchased items and claim refunds.
If you want to know how to sell online successfully, you should be ready to handle returns:
- Clarify the return policy for your online store
- Plan how to streamline and prevent refunds
- Integrate a solution that makes it easy to record returns into your books and keep a detailed balance of your business’s income and expenses over different accounting periods
How to increase online sales and avoid e-commerce business mistakes
Every e-commerce business wants to know how to increase online sales. More sales mean larger revenue streams and more significant cash flows in the bank account. At the same time, it causes an increase in the workload of your online store. When the sales go up, it becomes a test of endurance for the whole system.
Is your online store ready to keep up with the significant growth in demand?
Follow these pieces of advice to improve your online sales performance and help your e-commerce business succeed:
Integrate your online store to the right e-commerce accounting software that will help automate processes and streamline operations.
Increase the diversity of integrated sales channels and payment options to improve the chances for your e-commerce business to make sales.
Keep track of all your online store expenses, including payment platform fees, shipping costs, and refunds.
Enhance inventory tracking to balance supply and demand and sell online successfully.
Get the most out of automation software functionality and always know correct online sales tax amounts.
Choose the right e-commerce accounting software
More sales—more bookkeeping headaches and accounting nuances that can turn into a nightmare if you don’t know how to account for your e-commerce sales in compliance with all regulations.
Here’s a small list of the tedious day-to-day tasks that e-commerce accounting software can deal with instead of you:
- Real-time sales data sync
- Automatic reconciliation
- Multi-currency payments conversion
- Recurring invoicing
- Net and gross income calculations
Choosing the right accounting software will save your e-commerce business thousands of hours in time and dollars in your bank account.
Expand sales channels to make your e-commerce business thrive
Creating a scalable platform to accept online payments is critical to make your e-commerce business thrive. Today it is essential to constantly increase the number of sales channels and payment options available to your customers.
Today, online shoppers want to have different options for paying and being able to shop for goods through various channels convenient to them, like social media or a popular marketplace. For an e-commerce store to be able to increase sales exponentially, it needs to offer goods to customers through a variety of sales channels and payment options.
Make sure your accounting software supports the range of e-commerce platforms, sales channels, and payment gateways with the help of which your online store sells and accepts payments.
Track e-commerce business expenses: fees, shipping, and refunds
Selling online and making a profit is impossible if you can’t keep track of the accurate money-in and money-out amounts. Strategic planning for growing your e-commerce business also wouldn’t be possible. That’s why having a clear vision of your online store expenditure is so important. Various platform fees, shipping costs, and refunds—all these expenses can be recorded in books and accounted for automatically.
When you use the right e-commerce accounting software, the net and gross amounts from online sales are automatically calculated and reconciled. You always know the actual financial state of your business and can make the right business decisions.
Streamline inventory tracking to sell online successfully
The key to a flourishing e-commerce business is balancing your stock. To sell online successfully, you need to achieve a perfect balance between inventory supply and demand. How can you do this?
The answer is, with:
- a little bit of experience
- a reliable inventory tracking system
- and a thorough inventory management strategy
Predicting demand on stock inventory so you don’t sell out may be challenging, but you will learn how to forecast demand for a new product and strategically plan inventory supplies with more experience. Software automation tools will help you always know how many items you have left in stock and eliminate inventory discrepancies in your online store.
Let e-commerce accounting software calculate online sales taxes
Let us guess, calculating online sales taxes isn’t your favorite part of being a business owner. The federal and state sales tax legislation makes selling online in different states a puzzle hard to solve.
The good news is that e-commerce automation solutions can take a significant part of the burden off your shoulders. To facilitate online sales for e-commerce stores, many popular marketplaces and payment processors fill out the precalculated online sales taxes for the merchants.
Intelligent accounting software helps sync the correct amounts of sales taxes into the ledgers, double-check the correctness of the numbers reported, and detect and prevent any discrepancies. This way, accounting software for e-commerce businesses makes it easier to achieve accurate reconciliation and trouble-free tax reporting.
Bottom line
Selling online requires a lot of preparation. E-commerce businesses should recognize and avoid the most widespread mistakes in selling practices. To increase online sales and keep up with the rising demand, online stores need to configure online sales processes. A proper technological backup will be a must to survive and thrive during traffic spikes.
Using the right automation software will enable you to track inventory, handle returns and refunds, and provide customers with a wider variety of payment options.
E-commerce accounting software will also make it easier to account for the increased flow of online payments, keep track of the correct gross and net income amounts, and report taxes with peace of mind.
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