The choice of e-commerce platform is among the most important aspects of the online store, since it influences several factors that impact sales, such as identifying faults, improving the shopping experience, and managing the business.
Thus, one of the most important factors in a platform is its ability to help identify site faults so that errors can be corrected before they hurt store performance.
To help you face these challenges of e-commerce management, we show, in this article, what aspects a good platform should have and how to identify errors that compromise sales. Enjoy your reading!
What Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing an E-Commerce Platform?
A good e-commerce platform is one that contemplates all the needs of the virtual store, being customizable to existing demands and allowing the scalability of the business.
This way, as the e-commerce grows, it is possible to adapt the resources to enable the increase in sales, ensuring a good user experience.
With these characteristics, the benefit is that the platform can facilitate business management. However, the manager must be aware of the available resources.
Below, we highlight some aspects that influence the evaluation of a platform's quality, as well as the errors it may present and, therefore, should be avoided when choosing one. Check them out!
Lack of customization
A first aspect that must be evaluated by the manager is whether the platform has customization options that will be decisive in structuring the pages, improving the scannability of information and helping the user at the time of purchase.
It is important that the site allows some changes and adjustments to highlight products in promotion, and may include elements that help increase conversions, such as call to action of different colors and also intelligent forms.
Loading time
The loading time is fundamental in e-commerce, and issues such as a good shopping experience and customer retention depend on it. For this, one should evaluate the speed of the server on which the site and platform are hosted to ensure that in times of increased access it will remain stable.
As you do this analysis, the manager can see if the pages are loading slowly and thus, think of a strategy to improve this metric that is fundamental in the ability to convert and sell an e-commerce.
Incompatibility with mobile
More and more people opt for mobile to conduct research and make purchases, which makes it essential to have a responsive site and choose a platform that also has this feature to maintain competitiveness.
When thinking about the development of the site it is essential that, in addition to being responsive, the pages have an information structure compatible with different devices, ensuring a more satisfactory experience and good usability.
SEO problems
The e-commerce platform directly influences the quality of SEO. Search engine ranking strategies are impacted by the possibilities of editing various fields on each page, such as:
- title and meta description;
- filename of the images;
- fill in the ALT attribute in the image tag;
- have well-defined H1, H2 and H3 tags;
- insert content on the pages, etc.
These factors depend on whether the choice of platform was right, so these criteria must be part of the definition of the best option for the business. Avoiding these problems and checking how the identification of errors is allows the selection of a solution that is more efficient and aligned with the company's demands.
How to Identify Failures with the E-Commerce Platform?
In addition to the platform avoiding the failures we presented above, it should have a series of features that allow mitigating operational errors, management and operation of the e-commerce. In good platforms, there are features that allow you to identify flaws and help improve the site. Here are some of them!
Reports
To be able to identify the problems of the site, the platform should have the option to generate reports on different aspects. With this, the manager can see the performance of conversion, marketing, sales, and retention strategies, and can improve certain solutions according to the information gathered.
The reports are ways for the manager to have control over all the actions of the site through the metrics and thus be able to optimize and improve those that are not presenting the desired results.
Management
The resources related to management are also fundamental to identify and avoid some failures related to the operation of the virtual store. An example is the intelligent stock, which makes the system incorporate this information after the sale, avoiding duplicate sales or unavailable products.
The management also involves resources related to the issue of invoices, automatic sending of the purchase status, recovery of abandoned carts, intelligent price control, etc.
These aspects prevent the e-commerce from having outdated practices or requiring manual filling of information, which can lead to errors and delays. They are also important to maintain the competitiveness of the store by relying on strategies that improve the purchase journey.
Personalization
Site personalization is also an important aspect to identify and minimize e-commerce failures. The increase in conversion, and consequently in sales, is closely related to which aspects of the site can be edited and improved.
For example, if a flaw is identified in customer service, one option is chatbots, but this feature depends on the platform being customizable and accepting add-ons.
Therefore, customization is necessary so that as flaws are identified, they can be fixed with more modern and efficient features. If the platform is not compatible with these new features, it becomes obsolete and can hurt sales.
Why Opt For A Platform With These Features?
Many managers may think that the current volume of sales does not require an e-commerce platform with so many features and that helps so directly to scan the existing errors on the site, but this view is quite mistaken.
In a site with 50 products, the verification of the pages can still be manual, but as it grows this action becomes unfeasible and only an automated resource can ensure the proper functioning of each page.
Another important aspect is that only with a platform that guarantees a good buying experience is it possible to increase the conversion and sales goals, therefore, this investment is fundamental for the virtual store to grow and sell more.
By helping to identify flaws and having customizable features to correct these problems, the platform allows the scalability of the business, improved conversion, higher sales volume and customer loyalty. Thus, this choice should be very careful.
Did you like the content and want to know how an e-commerce platform can help improve your results? Then, ask your questions with our team of experts!
