5 Mistakes to Avoid with Your First eCommerce Store

Featured image by David Gyung

When starting out with your first ecommerce store, there are several arrangements you need to make. The art of running an online business requires stability, organization, and creativity. These features are necessary since the purpose is to sell to complete strangers on the internet.

As a newbie entrepreneur, there will be hurdles to jump, and you will make mistakes. Thankfully, some of these blunders can be avoided, as they are commonly experienced by new online business owners.

But many ecommerce stores still operate under a legacy system, even when modern innovations like headless commerce have emerged. Its possibilities now show a clear difference between online stores that can’t meet up with trends and the rest.

While setting up an ecommerce store is exciting, here are the top five mistakes to avoid. Some business analysts claim that experience and learning from them is good. However, it is preferable to learn about them but not to commit them.

Working Outside or Beyond a Budget

The first common mistake usually seen with new online entrepreneurs is working outside a budget. We understand that it’s cool to build a brand that resonates with current trends, but doing it outside a financial strength is deadly.

To ensure your first ecommerce store runs smoothly, there are three essential levers to pull:

Traffic
Gross margin
Conversion rate

While the last two pointers may be out of control naturally, traffic is important to lay a foundation worth keeping. Traffic means driving interactions to the online store, which means investing in marketing. As such, getting an effective ad campaign with a reasonable budget is possible. But this may also require extraordinary creativity.

Trying to level up with the big businesses by overstretching a budget is a recipe for failure. It has led to the untimely death of many an online company.

Sticking with Old Methods

Many business owners limit their style of business running to old methods, simply because they had some mentors who used the same model. For example, many turn to the traditional ecommerce or monolith model. This method attempts to run a one-center control of the online marketplace. But such a legacy system stunts growth opportunities. This is because they are not amenable to the expansion of a business. This severe mistake limits the chances of expanding your first ecommerce store to new areas.

The drawbacks affect how many business owners relate to customer services, requiring heavy expenditures to maintain their old code base as well as other outmoded systems.

Presently, there are new and improved business styles, such as the headless architecture model. It is important to note that a business currently moving from legacy systems can comfortably meet industry standards while keeping a good business ethic while adopting a headless model.

Yes, we understand businesses may need to stick to old and proven methods to survive. However, in this heavily saturated ecommerce market, it is important to leverage new standards to become more sufficient and expand to greater heights.

Terrible Customer Support

No matter the sugar coating, the primary aim of your first ecommerce store is to sell products to a vast online market. Therefore, it is a terrible idea to neglect customer service. Your store needs focus on keeping the store alive and running, but poor customer support sets it up for failure.

A terrible angle about online businesses is that the customer has the power through reviews. Everyone is aware that they can be scammed online. They have high defenses when inquiring about businesses. An ecommerce store with a poor rating and negative reviews will not be patronized. It is a poor business model to set high standards for good quality products yet fail to deliver on them and treat the clients poorly.

Hence, treating the customers right, ensuring they offer reviews, and even having them suggest areas where your first ecommerce store could use some improvement is excellent. It shows that you take customers seriously. When you do, they will always come back for more.

Strong and effective customer service is an effective marketing tactic for any ecommerce store, not just your first one. Referrals bring in more conversion rates than other methods, and loyal customers are the best.

Choosing the Wrong Service Provider

One of the most obvious mistakes new owners of online businesses make is setting up with the wrong provider. A wrong host could mean that the website hosting provider is not reliable. Breaks in transmission or slow transfer speed could spell doom for the operations in your first ecommerce store. This is true whether or not you have a firm strategy on the ground. Hosting your ecommerce business on a weak website means there could be breaks in data load speeds.

One of the best options that could salvage this option is using a headless ecommerce model for your first online store. This means a proper setup structure that clearly separates the user interface (UI) outlook or frontend (interface interaction with the customer) from the business end (server side) or backend.

How does this correlate with choosing the wrong service provider? Entrepreneurs who migrate to headless commerce are able to separate the providers for both the frontend and the backend. This setup allows smooth interactions with the customer with no break. Business owners can choose different providers to service these two sides, communicating between them through an application programming interface or API.

The benefit here is if there is a problem with the frontend, the backend will essentially be unaffected. This provides much flexibility to the business owner. Deciding the wrong provider for one end will not affect the other end because you can separate them.

Poor Research on Products to Sell in Your First eCommerce Store

A poor sales choice for your first ecommerce store comes from not researching which product to buy and sell to the right audience. Every ecommerce business should have a niche where they have the loyalty of a target audience. Be careful not to try to sell the wrong product to your particular market.

This mistake has put a lot of businesses out of action, especially as they do not have the right audience to sell their products to. It is necessary to research products with high demand and order them. This can be done by selecting a few products with good market demand, ensuring they are within the authority field of your first ecommerce store.

The Bottom Line on Your First eCommerce Store

Most new owners of ecommerce stores make mistakes, especially when they’re running their first online business. The struggle is similar to launching and competing with industry leaders for attention. However, preventing these mistakes by sticking to good modern practices like headless ecommerce shows many benefits for everyone.