3 E-Commerce Mistakes Every CEO Should Avoid

As a CEO, you know the pressure can be enormous. Your responsibilities seem endless, and you may always feel like your back is up against the wall to get better results from your team and keep your business thriving. With so many details to consider in your job, mistakes are inevitable.  Hopefully, you’ve got backup plans and solid resources to help you navigate through glitches or the occasional oversight in doing business.  

As you analyse your company’s e-commerce side of business, there are certain steps you can take to avoid costly mishaps. Here are a few e-commerce mistakes every CEO should avoid along with solutions for more effective e-commerce results.

Your E-Commerce Platform: Don’t Make the Wrong Choice

An e-commerce platform or CMS (content management system) is how your customers see, experience and ultimately purchase your online services or products. It might be tempting to go with the most popular e-commerce platform available. However, many CEOs have beleaguered the choice of popular over what a company requires. An e-commerce platform serves many purposes, and if not properly chosen, it can fail your customers as well as stall your business.

To elaborate, a platform that does not integrate with the necessary features you need to sell your products will kill your e-commerce business.  When choosing a platform, make sure it accepts all of the integrations you need for conducting successful business sales online.  For instance, a CMS like WordPress will accept a variety of useful and powerful integrations, like WooCommerce hosting, which assures your customers have a fast and secure checkout process on your e-commerce website.

You’ll also want a flexible platform that showcases your products or services in ways that appeal to your market and demographic.  While bearing this in mind, your CMS also needs to be diverse enough to scale and grow as your sales and company grows.

Your Customers: Don’t Ignore Them

In today’s world, e-commerce is becoming more central to how people live, work, play and purchase. And as a CEO, you know that your customers or clients are the lifeblood of sustaining and growing your business.  After all, they ultimately pay your salary and ensure the future of your company.  Avoiding customer’s needs and feedback can mean certain death to any online business.

With this sobering fact in mind, it’s vital to pay keen attention to making customers happy so they come back time and again to purchase from your site.  You can start by making your e-commerce website easy to navigate. There’s nothing more frustrating to a customer than struggling through a poorly designed site that is hard to navigate. Furthermore, give your customers all the information they need.  Customers have better things to do with their time than hunt down information about your service or product. 

Also make your site accessible to how your customers are using it.  For example, consider that more consumers purchase from their phones than desktops. According to online statistics, over 70% of consumers make online purchases on their smartphones.  That means one out of every three dollars is spent on a purchase transaction conducted from a mobile device.  In light of the popularity of mobile usage and shopping, you can see how it’s crucial to set up your e-commerce website with full mobile functionality.

Your Competition: Don’t Avoid It

You might be looking at your competition in terms of how they are outselling your online e-commerce business.  However, one of the biggest mistakes CEOs make is ignoring what the competition is doing in order to generate those impressive sales. 

Many business leaders are hesitant to see how heavy hitters like Amazon are crushing the e-commerce realm.  This is an egregious error.  After all, your competition is setting the pace and the standard for your own sales.  Therefore, make a thorough and sweeping investigation on your direct competitors.

Find out what they are doing that your company is not and start testing these tactics out with your own e-commerce endeavors.  If you’re having a crisis of conscience about mimicking your competition methods – think again. 

Bear in mind that e-commerce is a cutthroat, highly competitive arena. Therefore, you should do all you can (short from committing a crime or doing anything unethical) to gain the cutting edge.  Learning from your customers, competitors and selecting the appropriate e-commerce platform are just a few chief tactics that will keep you, as a CEO, on the winning side for your company.