What Causes Poor Online Sales

Fed Up Thinking: Why is it People Just Don't Buy From Our Site!!

From the customer's perspective, there are some fundamental things that put them off buying from you - the good news is they are easy to fix once you know what what they are and how to fix them.f

Poor Contact Methods

Firstly, you need to come across as being a real company that cares about offering a good service to the customer. You can look like a "fly-by-night" scammer if your contact details are hidden away deep within your site and consist of just a lone email address. Alarmbells start to go off in your customer's mind. If they think getting a refund, returning goods, or contacting you for some after-sales support is going to be difficult if there's a problem, then they're not going to buy anything from you - they'll look for a company they think will be more trustworthy and easier to work with.

Customers Can't Find the Product or Services on Badly Organised Sites

Secondly, if people just can't find the item they want to buy because your site navigation is confusing to browse or search and doesn't organise the information in a familiar, intuitive way- customers can't click on the buy button even if they desperately wanted your product or service! It's important to look at sites like ebay or amazon that categorise and organise thousands of products and follow their lead - that way, customers instinctively know where to start looking for what they want to buy. How do your competitors describe their products and services? How do they organise them? Could you adopt a similar structure, or improve upon it further still. Think about it. If one of your competitor's customers comes to your site, and you have used an intuitive way to describe and organise your products and services , these new prospects know where to start looking for what they want to buy straight away.

Poor Quality Descriptions

Thirdly, you haven't provided enough information about the products and services to give customers everything they need to know to make a confident purchase. For example, imagine an jewellery seller who has one fuzzy, poor quality picture of an expensive gold and  gemstone ring, relying on masses of text describing the exquisite setting of the stones, but no close up pictures of the skilled workmanship or just how sparkly and luxurious the product really is. No one will buy a product if they have insufficient, accurate information on which to base their decision to purchase.

Nasty Surprises at the Checkout

Finally, there should be no nasty surprises part way through the checkout process. There a multitude of problems that can kill the transaction dead in it's tracks for the customer, such as:

• forcing people to register and create an account with you before they can checkout
• extortionate shipping charges costing more than the goods and services
• no opportunity for flexible deliveries, like next day, evenings or weekends
• some of the products in the cart are out of stock for the foreseable future
• Only delivering to the credit card address and more....

These examples show that when a website is frustrating, confusing or fails to build an honest, open and trusting relationship between the buyer and the seller, sales quickly disappear