How to Drive Your Customers Away: Worst Practices in E-commerce

We’ve written about how to enhance product search and discovery for your online store—a list of best practices to keep your shoppers engaged and keep them coming back. We’ve also written about how best to appeal to mobile shoppers.

We all know that e-shoppers are hard to please, but surveys keep revealing something new about just how hard. For instance, it’s probably not intuitive that requiring a shopper to register with the store should be one of the top few reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Surveys also reveal that things that should be obvious—such as the need to take customer analytics seriously—are ignored by a surprisingly large number of companies.

So here’s our curated list of 11 practices that e-commerce stores should avoid. They include a few core issues, which affect everything else; processes that frustrate customers; and mistakes that negatively impact customer trust and engagement.

1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience

In 2011, a new CEO at JC Penney—one of the top ten apparel retailers in the US—eliminated coupons and promotional sales as part of a rebranding effort. The move led to what Forbes described as an “epic rebranding fail”; in an interview, the CEO literally spelt out the fact that he was unaware of what JCP’s customers loved.

Understanding who you serve is such a core issue that it affects everything from being able to create effective marketing campaigns to coming up with effective pricing strategies.

You need to know your customers so that you know what you mean to them and what you’re facilitating for them—which in turn helps you deliver what they need. This helps you answer questions such as:

• Do I need to redesign my website (or perhaps introduce a few contemporary elements)?
• What products should my site recommend to a customer (alongside the products they’re viewing, or in a personalised email) and what products should be displayed when an item is out of stock?
• What are the important elements in the design of my rewards and loyalty program?
• What products or product lines should I add to or remove from my catalogue?

Consider that the Bank of Queensland in 2021, Myos in 2023, and Investopedia in 2024 cited that one of the biggest reasons for the failure of (traditional as well as online) startups was targeting no particular demographic, marketing themselves believing that “if you build it, they will come,” or not doing their market research: Essentially, not understanding whom they were catering to.

Technically speaking, getting to know your customer isn’t rocket science. An online business can conduct in-store or email customer surveys, perform demographic analysis of customer data, track and analyse customers’ interactions with your store including what products they browse and what they end up buying, analyse abandoned-cart browsing journeys, and so forth.

The fact is that too many companies fail to realise the value of customer analytics. Consider just one example: Pricing strategy. Many stores price their products based on competitors’ prices, and there are pros as well as cons of competitive pricing—but notably, competitive pricing will be ineffective if your pricing strategy doesn’t capture the needs and preferences of your customers. Accuracy, personalisation, and differentiation in this context all come from knowing your customer.

2. Not Investing in Data Interpretation Capabilities

According to a BARC GmbH survey, a good majority of companies (not restricted to e-commerce) base at least 50% of business decisions on “gut feel” or past experience as opposed to analytics (or data in general).

That survey was in 2016, so perhaps things have changed? Well, not so much so in 2020, according to this report—but the intuition/data balance seems to have tilted more recently. It is safe to say that companies today are all too aware of the benefits—the importance—of e-commerce analytics data:

The data is there for the asking, but interpreting it correctly and using it effectively is not. The sheer volume of potentially useful data, along with the complexity that results from the interconnected nature of the data points, makes it difficult to derive meaningful insights—and even then, it is not a straightforward matter to turn insights into action points. Further, it is difficult to map intent to outcomes, whether in the case of one customer or of a demographic group.

E-commerce companies need to see insights from customer analytics as a must-do rather than as a good-to-have. They need to invest in data analysis tools, train employees on the skills required to make sense of analytics data or hire data interpretation experts.

3. Underestimating the Importance of Website Design

We think of website design as a core issue—and it isn’t just a matter of making your website look pretty. A poorly designed website generates a lack of trust, a reluctance to engage, and perhaps a refusal to commit.

Why?

Well, it’s a lot like first impressions. The sight of an amateurish or cluttered website creates a psychological negative impact that tends not to diminish as a user navigates pages on the site; the user tends to associate the quality of the website with the “quality” of the company.

Think of how phishing email is usually riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, too many graphics, and inconsistent formatting. A website achieves the same effect through poor images, inconsistent fonts, and incomplete or inadequate product descriptions.

One wouldn’t ideally judge a book by its cover—but customers can be fickle, and you need to cater to them. You might have a great, perfectly functional site overall—but if it looks tacky, customers might leave without even performing a product search.

As an extreme example, here are views from the main pages of two UK car leasing companies:

If this writer were looking to lease a car in the UK, he would imagine that the latter website is at best a joke and at worst a scam.

It so happens that both companies are legitimate and doing well, as Trustpilot indicates. We’re guessing that the latter company’s comical website is helping publicity. But not many e-commerce companies can afford to risk this approach!

An excellent example of the importance of website design comes from Airbnb, the leading website for holiday housing rentals. Their rebranding effort in 2014 included a radical website redesign.

The Airbnb UK page looked like this in 2012:

That changed after the rebranding exercise to something like this:

From the bland “Find a place to stay” to what seems a welcoming invitation to travel the world, Airbnb’s website redesign is generally considered to have played a large part in its emergence as the world leader in the travel marketplace.

Let’s now look at elements that generate frustration during the online shopping experience. Well, these are a matter of short-lived emotions and perhaps fickleness on the part of consumers—but that doesn’t mean you, as an online store, can afford to take them less than seriously.

4. Not Ensuring Smooth Checkout

A 2017 survey by a Web UX research institute ranked 10 reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Seven years on, the list of reasons—if not their relative importance—still serves as a things-to-avoid checklist.

High up on the list was a checkout process that was complicated or took too long. It’s easy to overlook seemingly minor elements that make the checkout process longer than necessary: For instance, after a shopper has entered their shipping address, typing out their billing address should be optional—but we’ve seen websites where both fields need to be filled in.

Interestingly, requiring shoppers to register for an account with a store—after they’re done building their cart, and before being able to check out—is very high up in the survey we mentioned.

Asking for registration might be well-intentioned: For instance, registration enables the store to save the customer’s information and make future purchases easier. Or it might be intended just to serve the interests of the store, such as by providing data for customer analytics. Either way, mandatory registration before checkout helps neither the customer nor the store.

5. Not Fixing Payment Issues

You can imagine what would happen if a first-time customer at your store tries to check out using a valid card and the payment doesn’t go through. The frustration is sufficient for them to avoid your site altogether—even if just retrying the payment would work. It’s about the sense of uncertainty: “Has my card been billed?” It’s the feeling of unprofessionalism on the part of the store: “They can’t even let me check out?”

Payment gateway issues can happen for any of a number of reasons, from browser compatibility to recent updates to your e-commerce platform. Assuming you regularly test for such potential problems, you need to ensure your customers leave your site confident in the knowledge that their order is being processed! This can involve on-page messages and timely communication about orders and order tracking. An online store can’t afford a situation where a customer, after successful payment, sees no “success” message—and receives an email that merely says “Your order has been received.” Such a customer might soon call customer support just to ensure their order is being processed (and resolve not to visit the store again).

On the topic of payment issues, not offering a decent number of payment options happens to be surprisingly high up on the list of reasons for shopping cart abandonment. Many people have reasons for strongly preferring one, or a few, payment methods over others—but apart from preference and force of habit, consider that:

• Some people do not—either because of a perceived lack of security or based on principle—like to use credit cards.
• Payment methods such as store-specific e-wallets offer convenience and speedier checkout.
• Some people might earn rewards on a certain purchase by using a certain payment method.

At the time of writing, Amazon India offered effectively ten payment options (some only on certain orders): Credit cards, debit cards, bank transfer, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) apps including Google Pay, a “pay 25% now, the rest in instalments” option, Amazon Pay Later—an Amazon-facilitated line-of-credit option, Amazon Pay Balance— an e-wallet that allows for the quickest possible checkout, and pay on delivery (using cash, a card, or a UPI app).

6. Not Having a Strategy for Out-of-stock Items

This isn’t about inventory management, though we should mention that popular items being too often out of stock can seriously hurt your company’s reputation. We’re referring to strategies for your search result pages to appear useful rather than clumsy when a product is out of stock.

It should be obvious that your site shouldn’t be configured for the out-of-stock message appearing on the checkout page. That aside, there are two broad alternatives:

First, not having the product appear in the search results. Depending on numerous factors, this could be good (the customer doesn’t experience the frustration of seeing “Out of Stock” in red)—or bad (they keep browsing the search results, wondering why the product hasn’t shown up).

Second, you could have the product appear in the search results with the out-of-stock message; this allows you to present useful buttons next to the out-of-stock product:

• “Notify Me”—for the customer to be informed when the product becomes available
• “Suggestions” to display similar products, or perhaps personalised recommendations based on purchase history
• “Bestsellers” for the customer to view the most popular items in the category of the out-of-stock product

Finally, here are four mistakes that create an underwhelming shopping experience by negatively affecting customer trust and customer engagement.

7. Being Unclear About Shipping, Returns, and Customer Service

These are areas where, for obvious reasons, online stores are entirely different from physical stores—which is why lack of clarity on an e-commerce website about shipping times, return policies, and customer service availability is such a big differentiator in online retail. Consider that the following events can seem like red flags to potential customers—or at least convey the idea “This site is iffy”:

• Clicking the “Contact Us” button only displays a phone number with no indication of when customer service will be available.
• The “Contact Us” section on the web version of the page shows an address, no phone number, and a “Download our App” button
• Shipping times expressed in the form “Usually ships within 5 business days”—which might or might not mean that it will take five days to receive the order
• Vague indications of shipping times, such as “Estimated delivery: 20 – 27 June”
• A “Help” section that effectively provides a single email ID to which order queries and complaints need to be addressed
• A return policy page that mentions some aspects of a potential returns process—but doesn’t mention details such as timeframes and costs

Such lack of clarity on e-commerce stores is sometimes deliberate—necessitated by, for instance, a shortage of staff. It could also result from poor website design or copywriting, or more importantly, a lack of awareness of the importance of these elements.

8. Using Dark Patterns

Harry Brignull, a UX designer, coined the term “dark patterns” to refer to practices that are “carefully crafted to trick users into doing things that are not in their interest and usually at their expense”—essentially underhanded, unethical e-commerce practices. A 2024 Forbes article provides detailed information on what “dark patterns” are and what they achieve; there’s even a scientific study that ranks dark practices by “effectiveness.” (It turns out that messages indicating limited-time offers are the most successful at driving purchases.)

But we’ve all seen examples of dark patterns: Hidden costs such as “handling fees” or “service charges” that get tacked on at checkout, countdown timers that convey that a stated price will be effective for a limited time, messages such as “only 3 left in stock,” and search result pages that list more-expensive-by-weight products higher up—under “featured results.” A 2019 analysis by Princeton University found that 11% of more than 11,000 online stores even employed UX design elements that deceive shoppers into making unintended decisions.

“Dark patterns” is now accepted terminology: In 2023, the Government of India issued its (draft) Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns. They define, among others, the following as dark patterns:

• “Basket sneaking”: Adding items—such as subscriptions or warranties, which the customer did not specify and might not want—to a shopping cart
• “Drip pricing,” in which the customer sees a certain list price for a product but other charges are added to that price in the course of checkout
• “False urgency”: Indicating that an offer is available for a limited time or that a product is low on stock
• “Bait and switch,” which happens when a customer adds a product to their cart only to be offered more expensive alternatives at checkout “because the product in question is sold out”

Ethical considerations apart, such methods might work for a while—but over time, there will be repercussions for the store in terms of negative publicity, reputation, and customer retention. The knowledge of having been manipulated can be a powerful incentive for customers to actively attempt to hurt a company’s reputation on social media. In an extreme of sorts, a food-delivery app service agreed—in early 2023—to a $3.5-million payout for a lawsuit that involved the company adding hidden charges to customers’ invoices.

9. Underestimating the Importance of Customer Reviews

From improving customer engagement to helping inventory management, customer reviews and ratings help e-commerce companies in many ways. They are becoming more important each passing year for customers and companies alike. Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at market research firm eMarketer, goes so far as to attribute a good part of Amazon’s success to the way they approach product reviews: “More buyers and products means (more) reviews … and more reviews beget more purchases, (which) creates a (vicious) cycle for Amazon.”

Rise of the Review Culture, a report based on a 2019 survey of 2,000 customers, states that about half of all UK shoppers check ratings and read reviews before making purchase decisions; that figure is close to 100% among US shoppers.

It’s intuitive that shoppers would trust reviews and ratings from fellow customers more than they would trust promotional material from a manufacturer or an e-commerce store—if only for the fact that negative customer reviews exist. After all, no food manufacturer would state that 15% of its customers, according to a survey, found one of their products unpalatable.

Product reviews vis-à-vis purchase decisions is one thing—but consider product reviews vis-à-vis perceptions of online stores. Fully 30% of UK shoppers are “sceptical” of companies that don’t post customer reviews; they believe such companies might be hiding something.

Not having customer reviews on your product pages is, clearly, part of a recipe for failure. But making reviews hard to locate, not providing functionality such as sort-by-rating, and suppressing negative reviews and ratings all hurt your credibility and brand perception.

10. Putting Up Poor Product Images and Descriptions

In a 2018 survey by website builder service Weebly, 75% of surveyed shoppers said product photos were “very influential” in purchase decisions. Well-written, comprehensive product descriptions and high-quality product images help drive purchases—all along the spectrum from appealing to the customer’s emotions to giving them the information they need before making a decision. 

Poor images and descriptions achieve the opposite—but beyond that, they can create trust issues.

Suboptimal images and poor product descriptions can send out the message that it might not be a good idea to engage with your company. This is similar to the case of poor website design; the keywords here are credibility and professionalism.

Worse, photographs that are not representative of a product can drive product returns: The Weebly survey found that a fifth of returns were because the items didn’t look like the photographs.

A product image of a living room sofa might speak a thousand words—so here’s an example of the kind of product photographs you want to avoid on your site.

…And Don’t Forget Free Shipping! 

A lot can be written about how much customers love the words “free shipping,” but suffice it to say that they really don’t want to pay more than the price they see alongside the product image and description. In fact, Shopify UK says that as of 2022, 62% of customers would avoid stores that don’t offer free shipping.

Customers won’t imagine that “free shipping” is a scam because online stores can’t take on the burden of shipping costs. They’ll likely appreciate how a single, upfront price eases purchase decisions.

There are alternatives: For instance, Amazon charges customers once a year for a Prime subscription, which offers free shipping on most items. Unsurprisingly, free shipping is in 2024 the #1 reason for which people subscribe to Amazon Prime.

If for some reason it isn’t viable for you to offer free shipping, you should display shipping costs (or an estimate) prominently and close to the product description and price.

In Sum

How to be successful at e-commerce is a topic for an encyclopaedia; so is e-commerce practices to avoid. Here, we’ve listed mistakes that are easy to make and easy to avoid: Underestimating the role of website design, for instance—and inadvertently adding a precious half-minute to the checkout process.

The e-shopper of today is pampered for choice: Not just choice of products but also choice of store. That’s what makes it so easy to drive them away, and that’s why the little details matter so much if you want them to stay with your brand.

Reference Links

• Checkout Usability Research – Baymard
• Business Decisions: Gut Feel vs Data – BI Survey
• ROTRC UK Report
• ROTRC US Report
• Draft Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns 2023
• High Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate Causes – Databox
• Ways to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment – Envision eCommerce
• Airbnb Travel Mission and Brand – Fortune
• Pricing and the Psychology of Consumption – HBR
• Dark Patterns Web Transparency Project
• State of Data Culture Report – Alation
• BigCommerce
• Ron Johnson on JC Penney – Bloomberg
• Top Reasons Small Businesses Fail – BOQ
• 9 Benefits of Analytics in eCommerce – ComTec
• Why Businesses Avoid Market Research – Drive Research
• Impact of Ratings and Recommendations – eMarketer
• Dark Patterns in E-commerce – Forbes
• JC Penney’s Rebranding Fail – Forbes
• Competitive Pricing Pros and Cons – Indeed
• Prime Video & Free Shipping – IndieWire
• Why Startups Fail – Investopedia
• Why eCommerce Businesses Fail – MyOS
• CEO Survey – PwC
• Dark Patterns in E-commerce – ScienceDirect
• Free Shipping and Conversion – Shopify
• Trustpilot
• Importance of Product Photography – Weebly