Five years ago, e-commerce accounted for about a tenth of global retail. Today, that percentage is closer to a fifth.

To put it differently, e-commerce is undoubtedly a growing and highly profitable market sector. Yet, not all online shops manage to reap the benefits of the ongoing e-commerce boom. If your business is struggling to bump up sales, that might be because your strategy isn’t set up or executed right.

This article will tell you about the most probable reasons why your e-commerce isn’t raking in more sales. We’ll also look at certain techniques that could help your growth.

Why Aren’t Your Sales Growing?

Generally speaking, all sales issues stem from two basic problems: poor lead generation and inadequate conversion rates.

In other words, your business isn’t attracting enough potential customers or, alternatively, can’t effectively turn prospects into buyers. In the worst case, it can do neither.

Going into more detail, the reasons for faltering sales can range from missing your target audience to lacking proper customer support and shipping options. The following list contains the usual sales pitfalls and potential solutions you can apply.

1. Missing Your Audience

The sales process starts with good marketing. In particular, it’s crucial to market to an audience that’s most likely interested in your products or services.

Of course, this sounds rather straightforward, and yet so many e-commerce businesses get it wrong.

Plenty of consideration goes into finding the right market. If you don’t have the crucial details of your customer persona figured out, chances are your marketing efforts will miss the mark. For instance, your sales might be slow because you’re trying to sell a low-tier offer to the higher end of the market.

The Solution

Studying your target market is one of the most worthwhile actions you can take as an e-commerce owner. If you want to find your customers in the expansive and highly competitive online environment, you’ll need to know precisely who those people are.

This also means understanding your product completely. It’s imperative to know who your product can help and which critical customer needs it satisfies. But those are only the basic, initial considerations.

If you want to target your ideal market with pinpoint accuracy, you should have worked-out customer personas. These are essentially invented customer characters that have the most common traits of a specific target demographic. These traits should include education, occupation, age, relationship or marital status, interests, and more.

Once you have a clear picture of your customer type, the marketing department will be able to tailor your offer so that it speaks to the very people you want to reach. In terms of lead generation, the research will pay off sooner rather than later.

2. Awkwardly Built Website

As an e-commerce, your business depends on the quality of your website. This applies to most companies active today, but is especially true for those based online.

When potential customers come to your website, they can take mere seconds to decide whether or not they want to become your buyers. First impressions matter a lot in this regard.

A poorly made website will usually do just fine in terms of traffic. However, its bounce rate will be over the top. People will visit the site and leave it quickly without converting into customers. And since a website is the central aspect of the entire campaign and sales effort, having it underperform will spell disaster.

The Solution

Building a website that converts can be somewhat complicated. It will require plenty of work and planning, but the result might be a dramatic rise in sales.

Two factors count toward a good website: design and functionality. Of course, these two are linked quite closely – a well-designed site uses its elements to guide the visitor to the essential functions, and the functionality is necessary to give purpose to the design.

Without getting into the details, as the subject of site-building is quite expansive, your website will need to look great and be straightforward and intuitive to use.

On their first visit, your prospects should immediately know what they’re looking at and where to click to view products or make a purchase. Attractive design will do wonders in getting people to stay on the site, while ease of use will ensure they don’t spend too much time figuring out what to do.

3. Inadequate Product Presentation

Many people would say that one of the main differences between a brick-and-mortar shop and an e-commerce is how customers interact with the products.

In a live environment, people can see what they’re buying up-close and, depending on the item, handle the product and try it out. Naturally, these options aren’t available online. However, that doesn’t mean an e-commerce can’t do its best to bring its products closer to potential buyers.

People likely won’t wait to pay for the product and receive it to see if it’s what they wanted. So, if they can’t view and understand the product in detail on your website, many might opt out of the purchase.

The Solution

You have two available tools to flesh out your product: imagery and descriptions.

When it comes to visual representation, it would be best to use images rather than videos. The reason for this is simple: Videos can make your website load slower, wasting precious seconds during which your visitors might simply decide to leave.

The images you provide should be of high quality and show the product in as many angles as possible. On the other hand, keeping in line with the loading time issue, you should keep the images at a reasonable number.

The other aspect – the descriptions – will need to be crafted with particular care. A good description will be clear and to-the-point, catchy, and worded to communicate most efficiently with your target audience.

If you get these two aspects right, your site visitors will know exactly what your offer contains. As a result, they’ll be more likely to proceed with the order.

4. Your Email List Doesn’t Do Its Job

There’s a widespread opinion among marketing experts that there’s no better way to boost sales than email marketing. And all of the evidence suggests this opinion is true.

However, plenty of e-commerce businesses tend to disregard this crucial online marketing rule. Their email lists are incomplete and limited – if they even exist. Instead of developing this side of marketing, many e-commerce platforms choose to rely on paid ads or organic traffic sources.

Having an ill-developed or nonexistent email marketing strategy can hurt every business, even if all other facets are in perfect working order.

The Solution

There are several proven ways to build a good email list. You can gather contact information through lead magnets, social media, and even by purchasing lists.

The crucial consideration is to get the right people on that list. Knowing who your customers are will go a long way in that regard. The other thing to keep in mind is your industry.

An email marketing campaign will have different success depending on the type of product or service you sell. Nonprofit, financial, and educational services experience an open rate of around 25%, while it can be nearly half of that for retail businesses.

In other words, the campaigns effectiveness will vary from one industry to the other. Still, it will be more effective than not having a proper emailing list in every given case.

5. Not Leveraging Mobile

The online space has been shifting toward mobile devices for some time. As the use of smartphones and tablets increased, it became imperative for every website to be optimized for mobile.

After all, mobile devices have surpassed computers as the main source of traffic in 2020, and that trend has continued on a steady rise. It should go without saying that an e-commerce without mobile optimization doesn’t stand much chance to improve sales.

When potential customers find your website on their phones, they won’t give it another look unless it functions perfectly on the device. In those cases, every mobile visitor will represent a lost opportunity instead of a potential lead.

The Solution

Every efficient sales funnel should do well not to rely on a single platform exclusively. Your website shouldn’t be functional on a PC browser alone, but that extends to other devices as well.

Going cross-device is the best possible option. Ideally, your visitors should get the same experience regardless of the device they use to access the site. All other things being equal, desktop conversions will usually be higher than mobile. However, proper site optimization will keep all options open, giving you a much wider selection of conversion channels.

6. Ineffective Shipment

Finally, your marketing and sales systems might function without a hitch. The issue with your sales might stem from the very last link in the sales chain – shipment.

Shipment time has become extremely important for customers, with Amazon building its empire in large part due to their single-day deliveries. If your shipment time stretches out to a week or more, your customers might not be returning for more.

The Solution

Use every tool available to make the shipping more flexible and as fast as possible.

You can ensure your customers get their orders in time by offering different shipping options, from the slowest free to premium same-day shipping.

It’s also worth exploring different options for logistics, as well as delivery services. In every case, you’ll need to get the shipping time in order as soon as possible.

Get Your Sales Off the Ground

It’s possible to boost the sales of your e-commerce to a much higher level if you apply precise problem-solving and proven best practices.

When you resolve the underlying issues, your business will likely see a significant increase in lead generation, conversions, and sales.