Five Common Pitfalls that New Online Retailers Experience

Many local retailers are anxious to start retail websites online so they can expand their businesses and increase their profits. Moving online is a great way to make a successful local business even more successful, but there are several common pitfalls that new online retailers often encounter. Being a small business isn’t always easy, but if you take the time to do a little research, you’ll be ahead of the competition and can avoid the mistakes that others frequently make. Some things you’ll need to think about before you get started are: hosting, domain names, good web design, business email accounts, and merchant/ecommerce accounts. Whenever new online retailers don’t understand those key elements well enough, these are some of the problems they encounter:

5. New online retailers often choose hosting packages that don’t allow for a large amount of visitors. If you don’t expect to have that many visitors at your website, then you can choose the cheapest hosting package, but if more people visit your site that your hosting package allows for, then the whole website will crash. Online retailers often underestimate the number of people who will shop on their website, which causes those websites to crash, and then it’s impossible for anyone to buy anything.

4. Often, people choose domain names that are too long, which makes them difficult to type and remember. If your domain name is too long, then many of your potential customers may misspell it or forget it, so they won’t arrive at your website and won’t be able to support your business.

3. Sometimes, retailers think of great domains for their companies, but then they sit on the idea for a little while. In that time, someone else may purchase the web address that the retailer wanted, which leaves them out of luck. If someone purchases the web address you want before you get around to doing it, then you either have to think of a new name or try to buy it from the person who registered it. If they think its worth a lot of money, then you’ll have to pay a small fortune to get the web address that you could have gotten cheaply if you had just registered it sooner.

2. Many new online retailers don’t realize that they need to get emerchant/ecommerce accounts so their customers can use their credit cards online. In order to facilitate easy online shopping, customers need to be able to enter their credit card information securely on your website, which means you need to have an emerchant/ecommerce account.

1. Small companies sometimes think that they can use their personal email addresses to respond to questions that their online customers have. Using personal email addresses comes across as amateurish and can really make customers uncomfortable. People want to be able to trust the companies that they’re shopping with online, which is why they expect retailers to be professional and use business email addresses. Often, you can sign up for these email addresses while you are registering a domain.

Network Solutions can help you move your retail business to the internet. To help you with the transition to the internet, get merchant account services.