A Statista study early predicted, “2 billion people will buy at least one product online in 2020”. Growing at 23% annually E-commerce industry was expected to touch new marks in 2020 but the corona pandemic has rendered the industry restless. The sudden break has left e-commerce players arbitrating between government regulations and customer’s need.
While a huge pool of e-commerce employees are busy catering to the essential need of government but there are thousands of employees are sitting ideal at home waiting for things to get normal. COVID-19 is perhaps the best time to review the practices that build the success stories of e-commerce players.
Let’s discuss some challenges e-commerce players can overcome during this pandemic:
#1 Return Rates:
An Invespcro study revealed: “30% of all products ordered online are returned”. Intricate scrutiny of the study reveals “24% of all returns occur due to errors made by retailers themselves”.
Top reasons why products are returned includes:
- Mistakes made by retailers themselves
- Wrong products are delivered
- Errors in the product catalog
How E-commerce Players can Control Return Rates?
Online stores can control return rates by investing in the following:
Catalog Quality Check: Indulging in manual check of all existing catalog can usher online stores towards offering a better experience to customers. A catalog quality is an intricate study of each and every detail of the product description, images, and attribute values.
Investing in catalog quality checks helps with the following:
- Improves the quality of the catalog and facilitates easier decision making
- Helps e-commerce stores identify and remove fake or imitated products
- Allows online stores to remove the error or fake details from the product description
- Improves brand’s credibility and brings in referral sales
- Controls return rates by ensuring that correct products are bought by customers
#2 Online Frauds
E-commerce growth is powered by the increasing penetration of Fintech Start-ups. From 16% in 2015 to 61% in 2019, Fintech Start-ups have powered e-commerce growth like no other factor. With more and more people using the app-based payment system, e-commerce players have added millions of users to their pool.
While the increasing penetration of app-based payment systems like Google Pay, PayTM, and PhonePe has allowed people to transact easily, it has also led to an increase in data breaches. Over 45% of Fintech’s main websites have misconfiguration and 62% of them fail PCI DSS Compliance.
The most common online frauds include:
Credit Card Fraud: Credit card details of users are being accessed and used for malicious transactions.
Solution: Furnishing PCI DSS Compliance can help e-commerce players overcome data breaches involving cardholders’ data.
Frauds by Customers: Customers are also indulging in online frauds that are impacting sellers as well as e-commerce stores. Customers often buy original products from online stores and return imitated or fake products.
Solution: Establishing a manual quality check during return pick-ups. E-commerce players can leverage the COVID-19 lockdown period to build a system and train their delivery agents.
Frauds by Sellers: Often sellers are found in grave violation of online rules. Desperate sellers trying to make quick money end up shipping fake or low-quality products.
A seller-buyer management platform: Online stores can build a seller-buyer management platform to help sellers and customers get in touch and solve the issue. The e-commerce player can also leverage quality check paradigms to identify and remove such sellers from the platform.
#3 Brand Interference and Duplicate Listing
84% of users are willing to pay extra for quality experience whereas 89% of customers have agreed to never buy from a store after just one bad experience. With customer experience becoming the key differentiator, it is necessary that online stores are offering an optimum experience.
Challenges that are impacting overall customer experience are:
Duplicate Listing: In order to acquire higher search ranking and more sales, sellers often create a duplicate listing instead of adding their products in already created listings. When a duplicate listing is created, sellers who follow all rules and are genuine are affected immensely. Sellers who are invested genuinely and abiding by all rules are forced down in on-site search results whereas desperate sellers with fake products looking forward to making quick money are ranked higher.
Brand Interference: When a duplicate listing is created or attribute values are misplaced, brand interference occurs. Brand interference is when someone searches for Nike Shoes and Local Shoes pops up in search results. Local shoes reflect in searches for Nike shoes because sellers have added the “Nike” keyword to their product description, which is against the e-commerce practices.
The solution to these problems:
It is necessary to identify these problems and remove them from the online store because it impacts the overall customer experience and leads to increasing return rates and customer churn.
Catalog Enrichment: Traversing each and every catalog and looking for errors and removing them or adding missing attribute value is called catalog enrichment. During this process, the misplaced attribute values are identified and removed, which ensures that only genuine products rank for relevant keywords. Catalog improvement methods, when leveraged intricately and implemented meticulously, can bring incomparable improvement in on-site search results and in search engine rankings too.
#4 Cart Abandonment Rate
On an average 77% of carts across the world are abandoned. While countries like the USA and Spain have the least number of abandonments, India and China top the lists. Some of the measure reasons why carts are abandoned includes:
- Slow site speed
- Lack of payment option
- Additional shipping charges
- Hectic login process
- Lack of security protocols on the checkout page
Solution:
Cart abandonment not only benefits your competitors but also affects your brand reputation. Here’s how it can be controlled:
- Getting PCI DSS Compliant and offering SSL/TLS Certificate on checkout pages
- Offering free shipping over a threshold price
- Offering multiple payment options
- Adding a progress bar on the checkout page to remind customers of how many steps are left
Final Thoughts
Once everything gets back to normal, e-commerce players will start delivering the same qualitative experience to common people. One day delivery and instant refunds will rule the minds of online shoppers driving the sales by leaps and bounds. It is these subtle fixes made during the corona pandemic that will pave the way for e-commerce success. Leverage the time and overcome all the illicit methods and innocuous problems that exist.
