E-commerce sites have to be appealing and easy to use. Visitors need to be enticed to stop and purchase with a smooth sales process.

Mistake 1: No contact data! Visitors need to be given a choice, either telephonically, by fax or by email. You must also publish your address. Otherwise, visitors do not trust you.

Mistake 2: Doing too much with your fonts and colours. Two or three different fonts running through the site is more than sufficient. Too many colours are distracting.

Mistake 3: Using outdated information (including stock out or not), to attract and keep visitors returning content must be fresh and up to date, and make sure no broken links in your site.

Mistakes 4: Disabling the ‘back’ button, this annoys visitors.

Mistake 5: Having slow loading pages is caused by having too many large images or as a result of low quality web hosting service. In addition, meaningless flash homepage or header can also annoy visitors. Why do I need to wait for the flash if it does not provide me additional useful information?

Mistake 6: Your site is not compatible with common browsers such as firefox, IE and Chrome, etc. Visitors may simply vist another site.

Mistake 7: Your site is not search engine friendly, and the content management system or e-commerce software do not allow you to do SEO. It can make your site not searchable in search engines.

Mistake 8: Photos that cannot be enlarged for close viewing are not a good thing to have on an e-commerce site. Shoppers need to be able to see every little detail.

Mistake 9: A site is full of graphics could be looked very appealing but your site cannot rank high in search engines without text content. If your site is a decoration or your traffic level is independent with search engines, feel free to build a full graphical website.

Mistake 10: The checkout page is too complex. Visitors will give up if they can’t check out within 3 steps: 1. Enters their demographics information such as billing and postal address, name, etc. 2. Enters Credit Card information, 3. Confirm all entry. Some companies want to perform cross-selling when the visitors are going through the checkout process, it is quite annoying.

Provided by Agog Digital Marketing Strategy Ltd, http://www.agogdigital.com, a professional search engine optimization company located in Hong Kong.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 9:16 am and is filed under SEO, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.