E-commerce is not as simple a business option as it might seem at first glance. But market research and advice from its results can help shed light on the flaws that lead to loss of customers and reduced sales.
The research company Qubit has been collecting complaints and recommendations from online retailers for three years, resulting in top reasons that can become an obstacle to success in e-commerce. So let’s take a look at them to figure out why your online business doesn’t work as expected.
Product Range and Price
Customers prefer online shopping to offline for various reasons, in particular, due to the wide range of products. Users want to see deals that brick-and-mortar shops probably don’t, so expectations need to be met. Experts suggest taking a responsible approach to improving the range of products, investing resources in the site, making a selection of recommended products, focusing on new ones, and creating lists of seasonal offers.
The Qubit research shows that the price is at the top of customers’ complaints. Based on this, the prices on your site must be competitive in comparison with other markets, and your offers are unique.
Stock Availability and Discounts
Another common reason that can decrease the profit is the lack of stock of products in the warehouse. It can pose a significant threat to your online business, which is expected to have variety and the ability to quickly receive goods. The strongest dissatisfaction is caused by the situation when the product is out of stock, but it is marked as available on the website.
One another clue you have to take in mind is to get rid of the customers of difficulty in finding promotional items on the website. If you decide to provide discounts or other favorable conditions for the purchase of goods, make sure that they are visible and accessible to the client. Also now, many online retailers set a time limit for special offers, which also needs to be reported.
Visualization
If your shop is not attractive enough, you are doing yourself a disservice. The study says that the consumer first views the images on the site, and only then reads the necessary information about the product. Therefore, the pictures on your site should be bright enough, revealing, and attractive. That’s why you should take care of the plugin which is responsible for visualizing the product on the website. Product Table plugin with a wide range of customization settings can be a good solution. You can control any of the products’ info and display from one place and be sure that the plugin is compatible with almost all popular WordPress themes so the issue between the plugins and the theme is excluded. 
Product Search
Nothing irritates the customers more than an inconvenient product filtration. If you are selling food, it’s really important to have the products sorting. To improve the user experience there should be product filtration. Lucky enough, if you are using the Product Table plugin, you’ll be glad to find out that the plugin has built-in filtration functionality. You can add filtration by categories, tags, attributes, and what’s even more, you can create custom taxonomies and the plugin filtration will work perfectly with them.
Website Functionality
Considering how impatient and even aggressive the average customer can be, you need to take care of speed issues. The more plugin you have on your website, the more time is needed for loading. Make sure, there are no unuseful elements on the pages because they can also slow down the loading. Products Table plugin combines in itself two powerful features – it can showcase the products and provide filtration for them. So there is no need to look and install extra plugins thus saving the server resources. What’s even more, there is server-side processing which is recommended for large tables that cannot be processed in the usual way. The table will be loaded ajax sequentially for each page, all filtering, ordering, and search conditions are also implemented on the server-side.