You could technically call anything you do wrong as a web retailer something of a bad habit, but there are nonetheless certain habits and tendencies that tend to be more common than others. So if you tick any of the following boxes, don’t be too hard on yourself as it’s something of a given that thousands of others in exactly the same position as you are indeed doing exactly the same:
Hiding Charges
Absolutely without any shadow of doubt, the single worst habit and biggest mistake of all is that of continuing to hide charges at any time. Unless the price shown on the product page is the full price including any taxes, admin fees and shipping charges, it’s game over. Even if your prices are still low once these charges have been added, there is nothing in the world that annoys web shoppers more than this kind of pointless deception.
Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies
The only reason any web retailer would ever try to hide or complicate their return policies is if said policies were in fact flawed. By contrast, if you offer the most reassuring of returns policies on the face of the earth, you should be flaunting them right there in front of your shoppers to gain their confidence. So if your returns policies are vague or in any way hard to find, what do you think this is telling your customers about you?
Weak Product Descriptions
Given the fact that your product descriptions not only guide your customers but also play a massive role in your website’s search engine optimisation strategy, it is pretty ridiculous that anyone these days would still be using weak, pathetic and generally useless product descriptions. Product descriptions give you a unique opportunity to be creative and boost your SEO, so use it!
Asking Too Much
While there is certain information you will need in order to process the transaction, there is also such a thing as asking too much. For example, unless you can wholly justify asking for the customer’s date of birth and the maiden name of their mother, chances are they will not take kindly to this kind of data mining.
Absent CTAs
There of course is such a thing as getting carried away when it comes to your call to action buttons, but at the same time it is an extremely bad habit to use too few of them or to avoid using them altogether. You have to expect that many of your customers will already know what they want and will just need pointing in the right direction, so be sure to do exactly that.
Poor Customer Service
Last but not least, just because you are operating digitally rather than from any physical store does not mean that you can get away with offering poor customer service. You need to make it possible and easy for anyone that wishes to do so to get in touch with you either by phone and by e-mail in an instant, as opposed to having to jump through hoops to find any contact details at all or being fobbed-off with telephone numbers that never get answered.
