Last Updated on Mar 11, 2020 by James W

online business

You have your online website and you feel as if you now have a business through which you can actually earn a decent income. You may have created a business plan and sourced your products really well. You may have even put weeks of work into your website to get it looking how you want. You launch and suddenly realize that your website may as well be selling dust because nobody is buying. Here are five popular reasons why they are not.

1 – Your website looks like one people cannot trust

This is a very tricky element to web design. You need a design and a feel to the website that is going to build trust. The first thing you should do is search as many eCommerce sites as you can and ask yourself why you will happily buy from one and not from another.

It is sometimes easy to find the answer to that question. For example, if a website looks like it was made in 1998 or has bugs in it then that is why. There are sometimes other reasons such as it looks as if it is not being updated, or it has too many badges such as “100% happy or your money back.” These badges have the counter effect and cause people to wonder why they are needed. Look at other eCommerce websites yourself and try to spot why you would not buy.

2 – Your website is lost in the online sea

You are hardly visible on Google and the most popular sites you are linked from are not sending you traffic. The fact is it is difficult to rise up through the Google search engine results, and it is hard to get direct traffic from social media and other websites. You are often lost in the online sea and it takes time and a ridiculous amount of perpetual effort and money to even make a small mark on the Internet.

3 – There is someone obviously cheaper than you

The use of comparison sites has lead people to think about price over quality, and the comparison sites are so easily manipulated. You can play the manipulation game, but people will be upset that you are selling either cheaper and inferior goods, or that you are adding on hidden charges at the end (hidden charges don’t register on comparison sites so you look like the cheapest).

There are similar products but at cheaper prices because it is hard to determine quality online. For example, you can buy numerous concrete bird baths for under $100, and yet the ones you buy for under $100 are often bog standard pieces that cost very little (when mass produced so to speak), and yet people do not know the difference between them and the ones that took 3 weeks to create and that cost over $100. That is why people go for the cheaper options without realizing they could have far better quality, simply because higher quality is hard to communicate online.

4 – You have thousands of competitors for your products

If you are not lost in the online sea then you are dwarfed by all the other fishes just like you. There are hundreds if not thousands of competitors for your products online, and what a lot of people do not understand is that competition is not always direct.

For example, if you are selling a custom made concrete table that is a one off, then all the people doing the same are your competitors, but so are all the people making cast tables, and the people making plastic and wood tables, and the people convincing your customers to buy birdbaths and fountains rather than tables. Your direct competition is not your only competition.

5 – You are describing and not selling

This is where you give out details as if you have read them from the manufacturers specifications. Imagine if phone manufacturers did this, there would just be lists of statistics on TV adverts instead of “hip” young people playing with phones.

It is also true that you can sell too much without giving people tangible information. Telling people that something is great without giving them real reasons why is simply selling without describing.

For example, the manufacturer of the Smart car could just say, our car is the safest car on the road, but if they did that then people would not believe them. So, they describe how the outer shell is reinforced fiberglass that bends instead of breaks. They then go a step further and show the cars being hit by demolition balls with people inside and having the people walk out unharmed as the car springs back into shape. This is a good combination of selling and describing.

Author’s bio:

My name is Sonia Jackson and I write for royal-essay.com that provides quality academic papers for college and university students.

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Founder and chief editor of makemoneyinlife.com Blogger, Affiliate Marketer, Tech and SEO geek. Started this blog in 2011 to help others learn how to work from home, make money online or anything related to business and finances. You can contact me at makemoneyinlife@gmail.com