MBA2037 The 5 Biggest E-Commerce Mistakes To Avoid + Free Ride Friday

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 pump up the volume for business insights every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 or you can win it for Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you want. It's that simple. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode you will learn the five e commerce mistakes you should avoid if you run an e commerce business. These are things you need to avoid like the plague. For those who don't know, back in the day I ran a highly successful e commerce business, Custom Clothing for men. This is why I'm so familiar with this topic because some of these mistakes, I made them. But you don't have to. So I'm going to make sure that you steer clear. Ecommerce is one of the most highly competitive spaces in online business. You don't need to make it harder on yourself by making it difficult for your customers. I'm going to show you how you can easily avoid these five crucial mistakes that many ecommerce businesses make, especially in the first few years. So let's get into it. I let's get down to business.

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And Conditions Having an e commerce business has a special sweetness to it. There's something really nice about selling a physical product, especially one that you've crafted to an audience, to your customers and seeing it out in the wild, seeing people post on social media, seeing somebody in real life using or wearing or consuming your product. But running an e commerce business has its challenges. Some of these are caused by these mistakes that a lot of ecommerce businesses or business owners make when they're running their business. Let's make sure you avoid them. Let's start with a mistake number one, and that is an unintuitive and slow e commerce website. There is no excuse for this in today's day and age. I've talked about different platforms on the show that you can use to have a brilliant ecommerce site. If you're in doubt, go with Shopify. It's one of the most reliable and easy experiences for for your customers and you. As the admin we run our Swag shop over at Webinar Ninja using Shopify and it's so, so easy. But more importantly, the experience for your customer is straightforward. It's not confusing. It's easy to add things to the cart. It's easy to check out. Don't make the mistake I made. Well, it wasn't really a huge mistake because I didn't really have a lot of options back then. But customizing your own e commerce site? Some people think they have to have a custom website and build their own CMS and all that kind of stu. No no, no. Go with the tried and true like Shopify. Some People try to build e commerce businesses off WordPress using WooCommerce and all that kind of stuff. Yes, you can do this, but it's a bit of a hassle. A lot of things can go wrong. Plugins can mess around with it, your hosting might have problems. It's just really important for you to have a smooth, simple, bug free experience for you and your customer. Go with the tried and true. Go with something like Shopify so you don't make this mistake. And I have it as number one because if your customers are strug to shop at your e commerce shop, they're not going to buy. If it's confusing, if it's difficult, you're asking for trouble. I always say a confused mind never buys. All right, let's move on to mistake number two. And I can't tell you how prevalent this mistake is in the e commerce world and that's low quality and quantity of product images. Listen, you're selling a physical product to your customers. You need as many beautiful images as possible to convince your customer that this product is great. They can't touch it, they can't feel it. They have to make a decision about buying this right on your site. Don't make it hard for them. I can't tell you how many times I've been on the other side of this equation where I'm trying to buy something and there's one or two images and it's really not high quality. It's not showing me all the angles. I can't really tell if this thing is huge or tiny or what's going on here. The minimum number of high quality images you should have for every product is five. If you have multiple versions of that product, different colors you can mix and match, but you can show people what it looks like in different scenarios against different things like to show scale, you can show your physical item on a desk or in somebody's hands, that type of thing. If you're selling clothing or accessories, take it from me, I had a clothing business. It's super important for you to show your product modeled by different skin tones, different types of people. Tall, short, big, small. When we used to do our fashion shoots for our product images, we used to get all different types of people to wear our clothing for the same item. Right? We would run the same item photo over and over, four or five different people in different contexts. A little bonus one for this mistake number two is also the product description. Give as much information as possible. Dimension, sizes, care, instructions, what it's made of, materials, if it requires batteries, all that kind of stuff. All right, mistake number three, a confusing and difficult refund policy. Face it, if you don't have a great and easy refund process, you cannot compete in today's ecommerce world. You need to make sure this is super simple and easy. One of the things we did early back in the day, 10 years ago when I had my business, is give them everything they need to refund in the package. And we say this in the process of buying. Hey, when you buy, we give you everything you need if you need to refund or exchange. Meaning we give them the envelope, we give them the bag that they need, we give them the postage, even the postage label so that they can literally just put it in the bag. We give them and put it in the post. Now, even if you're not paying for postage, give them the packing label and then they can go to the post office right then and there. They see the address, it's easy, they can slap on whatever postage is needed and send it out. An easy and simple refund policy for ecommerce is essential. What we did is 30 days, no questions asked. And listen, I understand that refunds sometimes are not great and sometimes when people exchange or bring things back, you can't resell them, you can't restock them. That's the cost of doing business. Unfortunately, what we did is any kind of product that got refunded or exchanged that we couldn't use, it was maybe worn or it was just difficult for us to resell it. We would get it dry cleaned and we would use it at our trade shows. The when we'd sell at conferences, when we would actually display our clothing at fairs, some people would buy right off the rack. And when all else fails, we would just donate it and understand it's part of the expense and we have to account for it. Mistake number four. And this mistake is so, so common, I cannot tell you. And if you avoid this mistake, if you don't do this mistake, you will differentiate yourself, you will stand out from the crowd. What's this mistake? A lack of easy to use customer support. You have to have customer support even if you have a ecommerce site. And I'm talking about helpful, fast support, even if it's just email support, but you get back to people within like an hour, you are going to wow the socks off of people. Okay? This is what made Zappos such a huge success. Their customer support was fantastic. Some people even go the extra mile and do chat support. The point here is that Give the customer the opportunity to ask you questions right on the site with a chatbot with some way to send you a message to close sales to help them throughout the process. A lot of people think support is only for software companies or consulting companies. No E Commerce. If you have great support, you stand out from the crowd. Some people like to just ask questions so they can make a better buying decision. This is amazing. This means they're asking buying questions. This is to your advantage. Advantage. Give them support, give them somebody to talk to so that they can buy more. And you'll find a lot of the questions people ask support are very, very similar. Like I'm not sure what the difference between this product and this product. Which one should I buy? Which one's better for me? How do I take care of this product? Would this make a good gift? What's the common thread of all these questions? Buying questions. These are questions that people ask because they're interested in buying. Give them support.

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Okay, let's recap real quick before we go to number five. First mistake to avoid in your E commerce business is a horrible and slow and difficult website experience. Go with the tried and true shopify things like that mistake. Number two, low quality and low quantity of product images. Number three, a confusing and difficult refund policy and process. And number four, a lack of easy customer support. Let's get to number five and that's no next purchase incentives. So many ecommerce businesses leave so many opportunities on the table. They make a sale on their site and they're like great, awesome. And they just leave it at that. Somebody who buys from you is highly likely to buy more from you if you incentivize them. They are already convinced of your value of your products. They like you. They made the decision to buy from you. They are your best chance for another sale, not a fresh customer. So send them an incentive to buy again. For example, what I did in my ecommerce business is that if somebody bought a dress shirt immediately, we would send them a coupon to get a discount on one of our accessories like cufflinks. They already bought a dress shirt and cufflinks. We sent them a coupon for a gift card so that they can gift to somebody else. The point here is that we give them an incentive to come back and buy something else, something new, try something else from our store. And you know how it is when you have a coupon or a discount that is limited time, it burns a hole in your pocket, right? You want to use it. You feel like you got to take advantage and you're just really just giving them an excuse to buy from you again because they want to buy from you again because they love who you are. So give them an incentive for buying again when they make their purchases, especially that first purchase. Well, there you have it, guys. Those are the five mistakes you should avoid like the plague as an e commerce business owner. Now, today's episode is not over because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is LakersMight T24. LakersMike T24 says over on Apple Podcasts. Awesome. Five stars. Thank you Omar, we salute you. The valuable content you share makes me a better person every day. Well, thank you Lakers. My T24, which is the handle on Apple Podcasts that left this review. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to Easy course. It retails for $500. Today's winner gets lifetime access. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review. Do it right now. It takes two seconds. Let us know what you think of the show and you get the chance to win a free ride. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred RMBA show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. If you're working on your business full time and you're feeling a little bit burnt out, maybe you haven't had a break in a while. This weekend, shut off a little bit, close the door to your office, don't open your computer. Get out in nature, have some fun, meet some friends, forget about the business for a couple of days. It's gonna do wonders. You're gonna come back with more perspective, a fresher mind and a new motivation to keep on hustling. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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