In a period where eCommerce sales are skyrocketing, what are our biggest challenges as online businesses trying to sell our products?

We look at three of the biggest challenges that we face as businesses in an ever-expanding online market.

If you want to successfully sell online, you must overcome these barriers.

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Customer Loyalty

The single largest challenge for online stores is getting our buyers to repeat purchases.

This is because companies often find that the unit cost for acquiring new customers grows higher and higher due to fierce competition. Therefore, in order to increase what we refer to as “Life Time Value”, we have to ensure customers who have already purchased a product goon to repeat a purchase in the future. This is the core of success of online businesses.

Primarily, this is done by utilising email and social media, in order to increase the number of repeat purchases by making the acquired customers ‘fans’ of their brand. This process is referred to as Customer Relationship Management. The reason why official websites emphasize this and there are so many CRM services is that clients cannot rely on the sales of only new customers alone.

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Price and Shipping Costs

To go to a more base level, why would our customers not order from our website in the first place?

The answer for UK consumers was price comparison, according to results of a consumer survey conducted consecutively in 2018 and 2019. In both years, those surveyed predominantly cited price comparison and greater variety as the two leading motivations to do their shopping online.

Delivery also plays a major part. In a survey where multiple answers were possible, 61% of responders said that they would leave an online store because delivery costs were too high, and 29% of British shoppers that spend £150 or more would not be willing to pay for any delivery cost.

The inverse of this is that 72% of British online shoppers are likely to add another product to their shopping basket to reach a free shipping threshold.

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Selling on Multiple Channels

According to the results of a survey conducted by the HBR asking 46,000 people, 73% of them are buying from multiple channels. Conversely, if companies don't have multiple sales channels, they'll have fewer opportunities to catch customers eyes. 22% of North American retailers consider securing multiple channels of sale as the most important issue.

As a real example, selling with 4 or more sales channels means a 300% difference in sales compared to having only 1 or 2 channels. This is very much where the omnichannel approach of sales comes in.

Within eCommerce, digital transformation makes it possible to purchase at both physical stores and online stores, as well as at malls and official websites, by linking everything via POS physical stores or using an app. It is becoming commonplace that end users cannot only purchase but also receive the goods both online and offline. The average rate of click-and-collect adoption in the UK is matching this, with 75% of companies adopting this approach in 2020.