When you start an online retail business, the first hurdle is getting your first customers. If you market yourself well, you should start to see your first customers. But that doesn’t mean that you’re a successful business yet. If you want to build a sustainable business, you need repeat customers that keep coming back time and time again. This is where a lot of people struggle. If you find that you’re making a decent amount of sales but you’re still not seeing that many repeat customers, it might be for one of these reasons.
Slow Shipping
People have incredibly high expectations when it comes to online shipping. We live in an age of instant gratification and when people order something, they want it there within a couple of days. Even if your product is amazing, you’re not going to get repeat customers if it takes weeks for it to arrive. Managing your supply chain is incredibly difficult so if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you should outsource to a company like the Moresby Group. They will already have good experience in shipping products and setting up an efficient supply chain so you can get products out to your customers in a timely fashion.
Bad Pricing
Pricing is a very tricky thing to get right, and it might be the reason that you’re not getting repeat customers. If your products are priced a little too high, people might be happy to buy one of your products, but they’re not going to become regular shoppers. It’s worth using some pricing software to help you manage it properly. It will assess prices and adjust them according to sales levels so if things aren’t moving, you can reduce the price a little. Equally, if you’re selling a lot of a certain product, it might be because the price is extremely low so you can afford to raise it a little.
Bad Aftercare
A customer’s journey isn’t over once they’ve received their products. In some cases, there might be issues with the product or they may just have some questions about it. If you don’t have a good customer service department that can answer their queries and sort out any issues for them, they’re not likely to come back. It’s important that you focus on finding new customers but it’s equally important that you’re looking after your existing customers and offering them a good aftercare service.
Lack Of Marketing
When you’re first starting out, you’re probably going to put a lot of your marketing resources into finding new business. That’s fine, but you don’t want to do it at the expense of marketing to existing customers. One of the best ways to do it is with an email list. You can send out emails to customers advertising any other products that they might be interested in or even give them discounts for loyalty.
If you make these changes around your company, you should start to see more repeat customers.