Most Common eCommerce Challenges in 2023

eCommerce has become an increasingly important part of all businesses in recent years. However, eCommerce comes with its own unique set of challenges that businesses must overcome in order to succeed in the competitive world of digital shopping. In this article, we will discuss some of the most common challenges that eCommerce businesses face and offer strategies for overcoming them.

1) Customer Experience is a Race

Providing a seamless and enjoyable customer experience is crucial for eCommerce businesses. However, this can be difficult to achieve when it comes to customer experience, businesses face the following challenges:

• Lack of Personalization: To provide a personalized experience, businesses need to have a deep understanding of their customers. However, this can be difficult to achieve in the online world, where interactions are often limited to digital touchpoints. Overcoming challenges in customer experience is a critical component of success for any organization. However, investing in a comprehensive approach to delivering a robust customer experience across all channels is equally important. While personalization, optimization, and trust-building are desirable goals, a poorly executed strategy can result in ineffective personalization that fails to engage customers.

The practice of simply welcoming users by name in emails is no longer sufficient to create a truly magical customer experience. Instead, companies must strive to anticipate and meet their customers' needs even before they are explicitly stated. By solving multiple problems at once, good personalization can streamline user experience design and deliver a more compelling experience.

• Slow Load Times: Customers are increasingly impatient when it comes to loading times. Slow load times can result in high bounce rates or customers abandoning their carts and going elsewhere. While concerns about shrinking attention spans are often raised, they may not reflect the complete picture. Although attention spans may be decreasing slightly, the more pressing challenge is the abundance of stimuli competing for users' attention. Therefore, delivering better, faster, and shorter experiences that stand out from the crowd is crucial for companies seeking to succeed in a competitive marketplace.

• Lack of Trust: Online shopping comes with a certain level of risk, and customers need to trust that businesses will deliver what they promise. Lack of trust can lead to decreased sales and a damaged reputation. A customer review, however, would provide a trustworthy shopping experience to a visitor.

If you are willing to win the race in a competitive eCommerce landscape, consider using Storyly Stories on your app or website. Storyly enables brands to record and stream full-screen, interactive shoppable video stories that demonstrate products and campaigns without any speed problems. Brands can utilize CTAs, product tags, swipe-ups, and interactive stickers to keep customers engaged and lead them toward relevant pages. And Storyly’s latest single-touch checkout solution, in-Story checkout, takes the shopping experience to a whole new level. This feature shortens the path from discovery to conversion with an instant cart builder and checkout platform directly within the Story. Using Storyly can put your brand at the forefront and help gain success in the competitive eCommerce landscape.  

2) Converting People into Paying Customers is Hard

One of the most significant challenges faced by eCommerce businesses is converting website visitors into paying customers. In the eCommerce world, browsing or window shopping constitutes a significant part of the user experience. Visitors explore online stores, often adding items to their wish lists or carts, but only a small fraction of them ultimately complete a purchase. While some carts are expected to be abandoned, decreasing this rate remains a priority for businesses seeking to improve their conversion rates.

It is important to acknowledge that converting visitors into paying customers is a complex and multi-faceted process that requires careful attention at each stage of the customer journey. Even after successfully capturing a customer's interest, there are multiple hurdles to overcome before a purchase is made. Thus, businesses must adopt a comprehensive approach to optimize each step of the conversion funnel.

Several factors contribute to the challenge of converting website visitors into paying customers, including issues with website design, unclear value propositions, and ineffective marketing strategies. Addressing these factors requires a deep understanding of the customer's needs, preferences, and pain points and designing solutions that meet these requirements. By providing a seamless user experience and building trust with customers, businesses can enhance their chances of converting visitors into paying customers.

• High Cart Abandonment Rates: The majority of visitors to an eCommerce site will leave the items in their carts without making a purchase. Just like window shopping, some people love to surf around online stores and check the items.

• Lack of Product Information: Customers need to have a clear understanding of what they are buying before they make a purchase. If the product information is lacking or unclear, customers are more likely to abandon their carts. There are a ton of other parameters for cart abandonment, but in the end, it all boils down to poorly designed user experience.

• Poor User Experience: If the user experience is confusing or difficult to navigate, customers are less likely to make a purchase. Poor user experience is a wild card for all the bad things that could happen in a digital marketplace. Lack of information, bad placement, long checkout process, and all the little details along the buying journey will add up and cost you a lot of money.

Another factor that can be linked to user experience is the fact that users on the desktop are more inclined to convert than users on mobile. The device size differences show a different graph when compared to traffic volume and time spent on each device; however, the same positive correlation does not follow this pattern when it comes to the conversion rates. That’s a huge challenge for online retailers as volume and conversions are coming from different device sizes.

The easiest way to tackle these difficulties is to use retargeting ads to remind customers of the items in their cart and offer incentives such as free shipping to encourage them to complete their purchases. Yet, if you have poor UX, you will be dumping your money into ads with nothing in return.

3) Marketing Expenses are Getting Bigger

With the proliferation of online businesses, the competition for customers is intensifying, resulting in higher marketing costs as companies seek to differentiate themselves from their competitors. In this highly competitive environment, relying solely on advertisements to promote an online store is becoming increasingly challenging and expensive.

Another significant challenge for businesses is the ever-changing digital marketing landscape, which requires businesses to continually adapt and evolve their marketing strategies to stay ahead of the curve. Social media algorithms, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising all require a deep understanding of the latest trends and best practices, adding further complexity to the marketing landscape.

In sum, businesses must contend with a variety of challenges when it comes to marketing in the increasingly crowded eCommerce landscape. By investing in a comprehensive and strategic approach to marketing that focuses on understanding customer needs, communicating a clear value proposition, and adapting to changing market conditions, businesses can improve their chances of success in this highly competitive environment.

• Difficulty in Measuring ROI: To maximize their marketing efforts, businesses must utilize all relevant channels while also assessing and optimizing the performance of each channel. This requires a data-driven approach that analyzes the return on investment (ROI) and returns on ad spend (ROAS) of each marketing channel. However, it is essential to be cautious when focusing solely on ROI and ROAS, as some channels may indirectly impact these metrics while still contributing to the overall success of the marketing journey.

It is crucial to identify which channels are most effective in reaching and engaging the target audience while also generating positive ROI and ROAS. If a particular channel is not performing efficiently, businesses should evaluate and make strategic changes to improve its performance or consider cutting it altogether.

While ROI and ROAS are important metrics for measuring the success of marketing campaigns, businesses must also consider the broader impact of each channel on the customer journey. Some channels may indirectly contribute to ROI and ROAS by building brand awareness and establishing trust with potential customers. As such, it is important to assess each channel's overall contribution to the marketing journey rather than focusing solely on immediate ROI or ROAS.

• Increased Competition: As more businesses invest in marketing, the competition for customers is becoming more intense. This can drive up advertising costs and make it harder for businesses to reach their target audience. More retailers mean you have to show some magic.

• Ad Fatigue: With so many ads bombarding consumers, it can be hard to capture their attention and stand out from the crowd. This has an intrinsic problem as well. People are seeing a ton of ads about anything right now. There are so many ads at the moment that even personalization of the ads actually means nothing because everyone does the same thing to the same people!

4) Going Omnichannel is Getting Hard

As the trend towards multi-channel shopping becomes increasingly prevalent among consumers, businesses are facing mounting pressure to implement effective omnichannel strategies. While this can be the right move for the current state of eCommerce and the economy, it is not without its challenges. Here are some of the reasons why implementing an omnichannel strategy can be difficult:

• Siloed Data: Siloed data can pose a significant hurdle to achieving a seamless customer experience. Many businesses struggle to integrate data from different channels, which can result in a disjointed experience for customers. Without access to a unified view of the customer journey, businesses risk alienating potential customers and losing out on valuable revenue opportunities.

• Technology Limitations: Implementing an effective omnichannel strategy requires a significant investment in technology. For many businesses, financial commitment can be a challenge. Additionally, there may be technical limitations to consider, such as compatibility issues between different systems and platforms.

• Complexity: Managing multiple channels can be complex and time-consuming. Consistency in messaging and branding across all channels is crucial to the success of an omnichannel strategy, and achieving this can require significant effort and resources.

To overcome these challenges, businesses should prioritize investing in the right technology to support their omnichannel strategy, ensuring that all channels are properly integrated and data is unified. Additionally, tracking customer behavior across all channels is crucial for providing a seamless experience. By adopting a customer-centric approach and leveraging technology to streamline their omnichannel efforts, businesses can stay competitive in an increasingly complex eCommerce landscape.

Conclusion

To succeed in the competitive online marketplace, eCommerce businesses must overcome numerous challenges. These challenges include delivering a seamless and positive customer experience, converting visitors into paying customers, implementing an effective omnichannel strategy, and optimizing marketing efforts. Nevertheless, effective strategies can help overcome the challenges in eCommerce and eventually improve the shopping experience.

If you are looking for a way to revolutionize your eCommerce strategy and help you gain a competitive advantage, consider integrating Storyly. Register for free or book a call today to get started.