The eCommerce industry has significantly changed the way many people shop. Research shows that about 2 billion people worldwide are shopping online today. A Statista report highlights that global eCommerce sales are to reach 8 trillion dollars by 2027.
These numbers are attributed to the convenience that consumers get when shopping online. However, that does not guarantee an eCommerce website’s expected performance. A study shows that about 90% of all eCommerce businesses fail and shut down within the first 120 days after launch.
This article outlines the significant causes of eCommerce website failure and how you can use tracking website speed to prevent this.
Top 6 reasons behind poor performance of eCommerce websites
eCommerce businesses can fail or not perform as expected for various reasons. Here are some of the top ones that can lead to poor performance of online retail websites.
1. Slow Loading Speed
A slow website can turn off customers, as most eCommerce users don’t have the patience to wait for a site to load. They will just bounce off, exploring other websites selling the same or alternative products. Data suggests that for every 1 second that the website takes to load, the conversion rate drops by 7%.
A fast website can significantly improve your customer’s overall online shopping experience by making it easier to navigate and ensuring that the information is delivered quickly. A study by Akamai shows that the bounce rate rises by a whopping 103% when a web page load time is delayed for 2 seconds!
This is why it is essential to ensure that your eCommerce website loads faster for visitors, which will help you increase sales.
Some measures you can take to fix website load times include choosing third-party apps wisely, avoiding GIFs, crushing heavy images, consistent real-user monitoring, and limiting the amount of special effects and other similar unnecessary content on your site.
2. Unoptimized Mobile Experience
For an eCommerce website, user experience is critical both before visitors land on your site and as they navigate through it. Ensuring your website is optimized for mobile devices is especially important, given the growing number of people shopping and browsing on smartphones.
If your site isn’t optimized for these devices, you risk losing out on many potential businesses. Recent statistics also suggest that mobile usage as a share of total eCommerce has already reached 60% globally.
Put simply, if your eCommerce website is not optimized for mobile and doesn’t comply with the ever-changing behavior of consumers, you are at a huge risk of losing out potential website customers.
To solve this pain point, you first need to understand the fundamentals of mobile UX. You can also use tools such as Shopify’s store builder to automatically create a store that’s optimized for mobile devices.
3. Poor Hosting Solutions
The hosting solution you choose plays a pivotal role in shaping the speed and reliability of your eCommerce website—key factors for long-term success.
Opting for a hosting provider with robust servers and advanced performance capabilities ensures faster loading times, smoother navigation for users, and reduced bounce rates.
It is recommended to look for hosting solution providers offering 99.9% uptime or higher and low server load to minimize the risk of unnecessary website outages.
In addition, make sure your hosting provider has good disaster recovery plans and quick customer support to handle issues fast.
4. Complex Checkout Processes
Effectively managing the checkout process of your eCommerce website is one of the most common challenges faced by online sellers.
Data suggests that as high as 95% of top eCommerce sites make five or more errors on their checkout pages, such as requiring customers to perform too many clicks to complete the purchase or lacking sufficient payment options.
The same study shows that if the checkout process takes more than 2 minutes to finish the purchase, 60% of shoppers leave their carts without any purchase. Likewise, if customers do not find a preferred payment method, they are likely to move on 85% of the time.
This makes it quite important to assess your checkout process from a customer’s perspective and work on any challenges that make checkout difficult. These include offering them multiple payment options, prioritizing user security, limiting data collection, and simplifying the overall checkout process.
5. Pricing Issues
Another major reason why eCommerce businesses fail is pricing issues. Users often compare prices online before making a purchase. So, if your website lists prices are much higher than others for the same or similar products, the chances of losing out on potential sales are quite high.
However, it is just as necessary to avoid getting too low with your pricing. Doing so will not allow you to generate sufficient profits to cover other operational costs such as marketing, shipping, website maintenance, and any staff or services that you utilize.
It is imperative to find the right price by understanding both the market and your costs. The key here is to balance between being attractive to users and ensuring that you make enough profit to sustain and grow your business.
Try experimenting with different pricing strategies to assess and find what works best for your audience and your business’s bottom line.
6. Lack of SEO Optimization
Having an efficient SEO strategy in place is crucial for defining the success of any website. An optimized website helps you ensure that your business works exactly as per the latest search engine guidelines, thus attracting higher traffic and better opportunities to convert potential customers.
The best way to master SEO optimizations is to analyze website data to assess how people find your website. You can start by looking for web pages that get higher traffic and conversions.
You can also use tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Putler to visualize bounce rate, number of sessions, user behavior reports, and more.
Some of the other things you need to consider to master SEO optimization are:
- Picking up the right SEO keywords to help your website rank better in Google rankings.
- Creating value-rich content that offers unique information is essential to ranking higher in search engines.
- Managing on-page SEO better to help optimize a website’s performance when building a business website.
- Targeting aspects such as web page headlines, URL slugs, and meta tags.
Wrapping it up
To ensure the success of your eCommerce website, you need to understand the importance of the above-mentioned strategies, as they help you offer a smooth, reliable, and effective customer experience.
Identifying the top reasons for underperforming eCommerce websites helps you understand the key issues. This knowledge allows you to take the necessary actions to improve performance and increase customer lifetime value.
To conclude, a well-laid-out performance optimization strategy for an eCommerce website touches multiple site components, including the code (both front-end and back-end), multimedia content, CDN, images, database, and server/infrastructure.
Likewise, it is important to remember that website performance optimization is a continuous and interactive process that needs to be updated regularly.
Keep at it and you will see desired results soon!
