Do you have an e-commerce business that you just can’t wait to see fail? Maybe your shop is just getting started, and you want to make sure you know how to destroy it. By following these five simple steps, you can rest assured that your e-commerce business will be dead within a few months.
But we don’t think that’s what you truly want to know. Most entrepreneurs like you want their e-commerce shops to live and thrive in the future. Honestly, if you wanted to kill your business, why start it?
Joking aside, starting an e-commerce shop is a great way to make money and succeed as an entrepreneur, but it certainly isn’t easy. Through hard work and dedication, you might even build your business into something great. Nevertheless, if you don’t take the right steps, or worse yet, take the wrong ones, your business will fail miserably.
So, if you want to be just like 90% of e-commerce businesses that fail within their first 120 days, here are five surefire ways to spell doom for your shop.
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Step 1: Design a slow website
Nothing works better to kill your e-commerce shop than designing a slow-loading website. To do this, start by using a website theme template and add a bunch of apps and sections to each page. Then, fill up your website pages with loads of 4K images and videos, preferably in file formats with no file compression. Once you’ve done that, go ahead and fill up sidebars, footers, and headers with ad space. Don’t forget to include pop-up ads as well.
When 40% of shoppers aren’t willing to wait 3 seconds for a website to load before leaving it, with the above recommendations, you’ll be sure to lose a good deal of customers. Moreover, 70% of customers said they were less likely to buy anything from a shop if they had to wait for the website to load.
That said, if you want your shop to succeed, don’t follow those recommendations–build a website that loads quickly.
Step 2: Ensure your website only works on desktops
As with designing a slow website, another key to killing your e-commerce shop and losing customers is to design the site for desktop viewers only. You can approach this in two different ways. First, you could choose a theme or template for your website that is not responsive–that will not adapt to mobile screens. The alternative to this is to choose an individual theme for your website and not bother with mobile at all.
After all, only 41.8% of e-commerce sales are performed on mobile devices. So, if your e-commerce shop makes $25,000 in monthly sales, you would only be losing 10,450 dollars of that by only making your website load on desktops.
Then again, if you don’t want to lose 4 in 10 customers, use a responsive website theme or an individual theme for mobile devices.
Step 3: Make the checkout process a hassle
The third step to destroying your online business is to make the customer checkout process as complex and slow as possible. This might just be the best way to watch potential e-commerce sales disappear like cash getting sucked into a vacuum.
Here are a few ways you can make the checkout section of your site perfectly horrible:
- Add as many steps to the process as you can
- Be sure to force customers to create an account–no guest checkouts here
- Add a lot of fields
- Never have inline validation
- Include pop-ups to interrupt the process.
We’re sure that the 69.57% of abandoned online shopping carts have nothing to do with complicated checkouts. Wait a minute–24% of shoppers leave a cart because of forced account creation, and 18% because of too long of a checkout process–that’s 42% that leave a cart because of checkout hassle.
Frankly, though, nothing spells disaster better for your e-commerce site than a bad checkout section. Want your business to survive? Make checkouts easy, simple, secure, and fast.
Step 4: Be unclear about everything
Another number-one rule for ending your e-commerce business is to be unclear about everything from your products to your advertisements. The easiest way to do this is to write product descriptions that are fluffy, poetical, and impractical. Don’t tell your customers what your product is or what it does.
Also, whatever you do, make sure you don’t include too many pictures of the product. Remember: your goal is to destroy your business, so you wouldn’t want your customers to think about buying anything.
It is also important to make the checkout process unclear so that customers don’t feel too confident and end up making a purchase.
On the other hand, if you truly want people to buy your products so you can build a successful shop, be crystal clear about what you’re offering.
Step 5: Never reply to your customers
Finally, another great piece of advice we can offer you if you want to lose customers is to be impolite and disrespectful. Never reply to a customer’s emails and don’t pick up the phone when they call. If you find yourself needing to reply to them, then you will want to be as unfriendly as you can be. One way to do this is to criticize your customers and make them feel that everything is their fault.
Think of your customers as your enemies and you will be on the road to ruining your e-commerce shop.
However, if, by some strange coincidence, you want what we want, which is to see your online shop grow and develop into a full-fledged business, then adhere to that adage: “the customer is always right.” Reply to your customers promptly and with friendly courtesy and you might just get somewhere with your business.
Amasty can help you bring your e-commerce shop to life
In the end, these five steps are your keys to the doorway that leads to ending your business. We don’t really believe you’re here to learn how to destroy your work, though. You’re here because you want to know what not to do if you want to run a thriving e-commerce shop. So, if you want to succeed, don’t follow these five steps.
Instead, make your online store the best it can be with Amasty’s website extensions and tools.
