10 Common Magento Issues that Drive E-Commerce Sales Down

by | Oct 1, 2015 | Blog, Ecommerce | 0 comments

There are a lot of best practices blog articles out there. Best practices to reduce shopping cart abandonment, best practices for homepage design, best practices for product page design, best practices to increase sales, and so on. I should know, I have written some myself. So today I am going to take a different approach. Today I am going to write an article on the top 10 Magento issues that INCREASE your shopping cart abandonment, or drive e-Commerce sales DOWN. This is for all you out there who are looking to scare customers away from your site as quickly as possible! 

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1. Poor Navigation

Not being able to find your keys in the morning before work is a stress-inducing scavenger hunt. Couches are overturned, closets ripped apart, and hair pulled out. So if you’re looking for record high bounce rates, make sure visitors to your site can’t easily find what they’re looking for. Fill the navigation with needless categories, with pages of links, and with complicated product configurations.

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2. Pop Ups

Since the dawn of the Internet, pop up ads have existed. Jumping out at you like the Internet’s equivalent of overeager sales people at Macy’s pushing perfume and cologne. Customers hate them and, with mobile commerce becoming more prevalent, closing them all can be a trying task. A surefire way to scare customers off is to front load your site with them, making it impossible to actually see the homepage of your site.

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3. 404 Errors

Speaking of obvious Magento issues – Wasting your customers’ time having them land on empty page upon empty page is a great way to move them along to your competitors. Having 404 error pages is not only a great way to drop your page ranking, but it’s also a wonderful way to show your customer you could care less about their time and their need to find important information.

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4. Auto Sound

Videos on Facebook with calm music and a nice relaxing background for 45 seconds and then a goblin jumps out at you are great fun to send to friends and family. They scare the pants off of them as we sit back and laugh. Luckily, you can do the same thing on your site. Embedding videos that auto play with loud music is a great way to welcome someone to your site. It works even better if they’re at work or in a quiet location and can’t find the volume or mute buttons fast enough. This leaves exiting your site their only option.

5. Slow Load Times

While a fast site will help your page rank on Google, it does limit you on those 10,000 x 10,000 gif images that everyone loves, right? And who doesn’t love a picture of your product in full HD that will only fit on a 70 inch TV! Customers will have to wait so long for your site to load it they will envy the old dial up Internet load times.

6. Not Mobile Responsive

With mobile commerce on the rise, a surefire way to drive your e-Commerce sales down is to make sure your site is only viewable on desktops with a 27-inch monitor or larger. Make sure when you look at the site on anything smaller than a 15-inch monitor it becomes a complex game of zoom in, zoom out, and scrolling.

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7. Not Readable, Scan-able, or Proofread

Why spend extra time reviewing the content on your site? You have more important things to do than make sure your product descriptions, about us sections, and static content pages make sense. Plus, why do you care? If your customers want to read they can go to the library! You only care about getting them off your e-Commerce site as quickly as possible. So skip the proofreading, proper sentence structure, and meaningful content, and get back to filling the two orders you got from friends and family because they felt bad.

8.  Use of Flash

A favorite of my Magento issues – Flash is awesome! Animations, videos, and completely interactive GUI! I mean, what could possibly be wrong with a website built 100% with flash rather than HTML5? Oh, many devices such as iPhones and iPads can’t display flash? Who cares. My dancing monkeys are worth the loss of conversions.

9. Information is Split on Several Pages

To artificially inflate your page rank and page visits, divide up important information on as many pages as possible. Such as splitting up product descriptions, photos, and detailed description on as many different pages as possible. This way Google will see people are clicking all over the site. That is right before they click the small x in the upper right hand corner, without placing the order of course.

10. Contact Form Rather Than Real Contact Info

Great customer service is time consuming and requires a lot of effort. Answering customer’s questions so they place an order is just annoying. So rather than placing actual contact information, like an address or phone number, just slap up a contact us form that gives potential customers no assurance that they will ever hear back from you. Or, better yet, doesn’t let them know that you are a legitimate company in any way.

Common Magento Issues that Drive Your E-Commerce Sales Down

If you include all the 10 Magento issues listed above you are surely likely to drive your e-Commerce sales down. However, if you want to increase your e-Commerce sales, or even master the art of e-Commerce upselling, then contact us today and discover how Web 2 Market can help you with your e-Commerce sales needs.

 

 

 

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