Common Struggles of A New E-commerce Seller

An e-commerce store owner faces numerous challenges in today's evolving and saturated market. Visibility and conversions are the two most crucial factors in achieving e-commerce success, and many new stores struggle with them. 

If you are reading this, you are already a new store owner or thinking of becoming one very soon. Either way, you are in the right place to know the 3 difficulties that could trouble your existence in the e-commerce world. So, without further ado, let’s get to know them all. 

3 Challenges Every New E-commerce Store Owner Faces

E-commerce is like traditional commerce, but here you need to handle everything online, like managing inventory, dealing with customers, and more. Unlike the physical store, you need to establish your business on the internet and make efforts so people can find you. 

A well-established e-commerce business is well aware of challenges and obstacles, hence they deal with them timely manner, but a new owner struggles. Speaking of which, let’s get to understand the 5 challenges that every new e-commerce business owner faces. 

Challenge No. 1) Establishing Your Store's Visibility Online 

To sell via an e-commerce website, you have to ensure that your store is visible on search engines like Google or Bing. That means if a potential buyer is searching for an item you sell on Google, the results must pop up with your website. And that’s one of the difficult and important things to achieve as a new store owner. 

How can you sell when your potential customers can’t even reach your store? To cope with this challenge, a new store owner must have to think about strategies and implementation to make their products or website visible on search engines for relevant searches. The process is known as Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it takes some time and effort to be fruitful. 

How to Deal with This Challenge?

Fortunately, there are several ways to deal with the visibility issue, the most prominent of which are: 

• Hiring an SEO expert who will make a strategy to ensure your website ranks in the SERP through keyword placement and quality content. 
• Make use of social media and other platforms to help people connect with your brand. 
• Use extensions, modules, or addons that your specific platform is offering for SEO.
• Use search engine ads or Meta ads for targeting potential buyers with paid campaigns. 

Real World Example: 

Let’s say you are running an e-commerce store on the Prestashop platform. You have set up a nice store with great product display, but now you need people to visit your website and make purchases. Now you have different options for ranking your website, but you have relied on the most affordable right now, which is to use Prestashop Modules. 

The Advanced SEO Module by FME Modules is a good add-on to get started with SEO, as it offers powerful technical and non-technical SEO facilities your store needs. As your store matures with more people visiting, you can then look at keeping a full-time SEO team and finally moving on to the paid ads when budget allows. 

Challenge No. 2: Sustainable Business Model

Most businesses in the initial stages don’t think of a successful building model, which gets costly for them in the end. Lack of a proper plan on how to deal with long-term business challenges could result in a fiasco. 

How to Deal with This Challenge

To overcome the sustainability issue, you need to think of the following from day one of your business: 

• Think about your niche and target audience. What is your product now, and what may it look like in the future?
• Work on building a community around your store through social media, content marketing, and more. 
• Offer better products than your competitors. 
• Make efforts to retain your customers.

Real World Example

Let’s imagine again that you are a new seller offering your products via the Prestashop platform. You are now getting some traffic through SEO using modules or experts, but you are concerned about the longevity and sustainability of your business. For that, you can create social media handles and post engaging stuff there, along with trying other ways to connect with your customers. 

You can also use Modules like Product Customization and more to let your customers customize their products as per their liking, which is also a good way to connect with them. 

Challenge No. 3: Shipping and Inventory Management

Timely and safe delivery of goods to customers is also a big concern for e-commerce store owners. Also, the owner has to ensure that inventory is available all the time, as the potential customer may order it at any time of the day or night. Dispatching to the wrong address or non-availability of products on time could not only result in lost sales but also the loss of reputation. 

How to Deal with This Challenge

To tackle this challenge, you need to ensure your shipping policy is well-defined and that you are relying on trusted couriers for the timely delivery. Also: 

• Make sure you are managing your store’s inventory well and timely ordering new stuff when necessary. 
• You are properly tagging your website with ‘Non-available’ once any inventory is not available to avoid inconvenience to potential customers. 

Real-time Example

So you are a Store owner selling your products via the Prestashop platform. Now that you have a good number of units sold every day, it’s getting hard for you to keep up with the inventory. Plus, you don’t have a dynamic shipping policy in place, which is an important aspect of e-commerce success these days. 

To overcome this, you can use inventory management or dynamic shipping modules like Free Shipping by FME Modules that will automate things initially, and then you can keep a full-time team when operations get complex. 

Take Away

E-commerce, like any other business, takes a lot of effort, time, and skills to establish as a successful venture. New sellers, in particular, have to overcome so many challenges if they are to run in the long run with giants. This interesting and informational blog post has highlighted the 3 most crucial problems that new e-commerce store owners face. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What are the common challenges of New E-commerce sellers? 

The three most common issues the new store owner faces are visibility, sustainability, and management. 

2. Is Prestashop a Good Platform to Start a New E-commerce Business? 

Yes, Prestashop is a very powerful platform that can help you build a successful business. It’s open source, and you can enrich that with addons known as modules. 

3. How to Ensure A Good Shipping Policy on My E-commerce Store?

You can use modules like Free shipping by FME Modules to set dynamic shipping strategies based on product, range, customers, and more.