Welcome back to 17 Ways to Deal with the Top Pain Points of eCommerce.

By now you’ve probably noticed a recurring theme in this series – there’s a lot of work involved in creating happy, loyal online customers.

It involves getting visitors to your site and converting their “just browsing” to sales, but also a lot of teamwork — connecting with your suppliers and fulfillment are also vital to customer loyalty. Below are some ways to connect to customers and fulfill their wants and needs.

Listen to Customers. Firstly, marketers need to listen to their customers instead of simply “watching” them. (more…)

In this fourth post in the Bridgeline blog series 17 Ways to Deal with the Top Pain Points of eCommerce – we look at fulfillment.

One thing that will trip up even the best marketer is a failure to clinch order fulfillment after making the sale – a task which often rests entirely on logistics that aren’t always entirely within your control. Whether it’s because of a failure to build a clear and complete logistical support flow or cost – much depends on your ability to manage the far side of the sale. Dealing with any failure on the part of anyone else down the logistics line – packing, shipping and tracking of purchased items, and, even more problematic, returns – eats away at your margin. (more…)

Welcome  to the third installment of Bridgeline’s blog series on 17 Ways to Deal with the Top Pain Points of eCommerce. So far we’ve looked at drawing customers onto the site and actually converting them once they’ve arrived.  Today’s post looks at exposing some of the pitfalls of  internationalization — so you can increase your market potential without getting so bogged down by challenges of global commerce that the expansion isn’t worth it. The challenges of internationalization aren’t always easy, but with the right planning it can be worth the effort.

More than half of US retailers only sell within United States borders, thus reaching only 5% of the world’s population.  New markets await them overseas, especially in technology-savvy countries where internet usage is even higher.  Moreover, eCommerce is growing more rapidly in areas such as Brazil or China than in the US and EU.  Online spending in most counties is expected to grow faster in the next three years than total retail spending.

• Consider expanding across borders if your product line merits it.  Why only reach 5 % of the market when the internet puts so much more of it within your reach?

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from Zazzle.com

• Online customers are increasingly demanding. Over half of all US online sales in the Christmas season last year involved free shipping, a number that climbs year over year. Shipping costs are a major factor in shopping cart abandonment. You can deal with this in various ways, but the ability to choose flat shipping or to estimate shipping costs in real time – depending on your target customer – is a major plus.

No business can afford to ignore its web presence, especially its eCommerce portal.   Online is increasingly the way business is done:  nearly $1 of every $10 is now spent online, roughly 4.6% of $1.05 trillion in sales just in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone. And the explosion of the mobile market just adds to this party buzz – purchases made on mobile devices are predicted to reach as much as $4.9 billion this year, and to grow to as much as $163 billion by 2015.

And the ground is rapidly shifting, given the number of new social media outlets appearing along with the seismic shift towards mobile browsing and buying.  Over 63% of retailers are currently considering a redesign so that their site will look better to smart phone and tablet browsers, and according to Internet Retailer, over 80% said they were going to devote more resources to mobile in 2011, a number that has climbed in 2012 as mobile purchases rise.

But controlling your eCommerce business is increasingly challenging for a number of reasons.  A number of pitfalls await both experienced retailers and wholesalers, not just those new to landscape. Anyone who has spent any time dealing with eCommerce will recognize a number of the pain points listed below.  Unwary sellers may stumble in finding customers – or having customers find them – to actually making the sale, fulfilling the order in a timely manner or ending up with a happy – and repeat – customer.  But this series contains a number of concrete ways to deal with many of these issues and boost your eCommerce ventures.

Top Pain points of eCommerce

• Recognition and Driving Traffic
• Conversions – Turning Browsing into Sales
• Fulfillment & Logistics
• Internationalization
• Customer Satisfaction/Loyalty
• Finding a total solution

If these pain points sound familiar to you, stay tuned for Bridgeline Digital’s five-part series on 17 Ways to Deal with the Top Pain Points of eCommerce.

Many of these have manageable solutions that are not out of reach of marketers, especially if you’re willing to look into new technologies to help you deal with the shifting eCommerce landscape. Read on for the first installment with some concrete steps to improve your site traffic through better SEO and email marketing.

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