Challenges of Selling Online Every Shop Owner Should Know

In the age of digital technology, and with the world having just gone through the Covid-19 pandemic, selling online has become more popular and powerful than ever. But it also has quite a few drawbacks and risks to be aware of. Let's MONA Media look at some risks and difficulties of selling online that business owners will face in this article!

1. The risk of competitors stealing your customers

Competitors is seen as the biggest difficulty of selling online, making your brand fade and costing you potential customers. Yet it happens so often that many online shop owners are constantly "having headaches" over it. In various ways, your competitors will take your customer data, which hurts your sales to some degree.

Customer data plays a big part in whether your online business works. Customer information helps you earn more profit and find more potential customers. So when customers are stolen, the competitor benefits, and customers may also feel your shop is untrustworthy if a nasty competitor badmouths you to them.

For example, you sell genuine lipstick through Facebook and close orders when customers "comment" their phone numbers.

This gives a competitor the chance to impersonate your shop and sell poor-quality goods to those customers. You then lose both your reputation and future orders, and get labeled a fake seller. If it goes on, your business can face losses or even bankruptcy.

2. The risk of unprofessional shippers

An unprofessional or dishonest shipper can absolutely happen. Customers get annoyed if the shipper always looks grumpy or treats them badly. A shipper may also deliver late or handle the goods carelessly. These things leave customers unhappy and can cost you quite a bit.

For example, you order a birthday cake for 7 pm and remind the shipper to deliver carefully so the cake is not damaged. But when the shipper arrives, the customer complains that the delivery was 30 minutes late and the cake is crooked and misshapen. This not only upsets the customer but also costs you your reputation.

3. The risk of customers "bombing" orders

A difficulty of selling online you cannot ignore is customers "bombing" your orders. It even happens as often as "daily meals". In many cases, customers promise to accept the goods and pay by COD when they arrive. But when the shipper calls to deliver, they deliberately refuse to accept or do not even answer the phone.

Or a customer answers but says something urgent came up, refuses the goods and does not repay the shipping fee. You then fail to sell and lose the shipping cost both ways, there and back.

For perishable goods such as online food, this hurts your business even more. If this happens, you have to beg people to buy at a low price or eat it yourself. If it keeps happening, your business will be seriously affected.

4. Building an online selling brand

Build brand awareness in customers' minds is a long process that needs careful investment and building. Online sellers, drawn by attractive sales and profit, can fall into this trap, especially brands that have not defined their goals. Strong brands usually understand this, so they focus heavily on building awareness and positioning the brand consistently and clearly, and only then use marketing tactics to turn potential customers into buyers.

Focusing on building an online sales brand, reaching customers through discounts, demand-boosting offers and constant marketing tactics can make customers see your brand as just a retailer. Overdoing it also leaves customers unable to see how your brand is different. They can clearly see that anyone can discount, sell and praise their product quality in the same way.

5. The capital problem

Business capital is the first thing to think about before starting any business. With little capital, your business will certainly have a harder time. With more capital, you can compete and reach customers better than your rivals.

Buying in bulk gets you wholesale prices, which save much more than buying retail. Besides buying stock, you also have to spend on advertising, and that cost is not cheap if you really want many customers to know you.

6. Price competition

Customers are getting smarter at researching before they buy, which creates a difficulty for online sellers on the issue of product prices. They can search prices and read reviews from people who bought from your shop and from your competitors. If a competitor sells the same product at a more competitive price, or has better reviews from past customers on price and quality, buyers will naturally see the competitor as more trustworthy than you.

7. Attracting and keeping customers

As mentioned, customers now have more choices and know more, and they are pickier about products and services. So when selling online, you need a process before, during and after the sale to attract and keep customers.

Every shop struggles to make a strong impression and keep customers. To build something unique, you need a standout product, from advice to delivery to building an online customer care system. All of these must leave a good impression to raise your customer retention rate.

→ See also: Tips for keeping customers when selling online

Keeping customers after winning them is hard because you must reply quickly and consistently, even outside working hours. A shop owner cannot stay up all night, and hiring staff for every shift pushes costs up. That is why many shops bring in chatbot AI to handle basic questions and save customer details to follow up the next day.

General solutions to reduce the risks and difficulties of selling online

Those are some common risks that almost everyone who chooses an online business model will face. To reduce them, first identify and predict the most likely risks and rank them by priority.

Next, based on your priority list, prepare as many fixes as you can for each problem (plan A, plan B, plan C and so on). This prepares you mentally to face a risk even if it really happens and threatens your business. You will still feel "confident and ready" because you already have backups in place. All you have to do is apply them. The more carefully and thoroughly planned solutions you have, the better your chance of solving the problem.

Many businesses starting to sell online run into problems such as an unprofessional storefront, products that do not stand out and limited reach, so order numbers fall short of expectations. The way to remove these barriers is to set up Shopee store building service at MONA Media. This is a leading e-commerce platform with a huge user base. It helps a brand set up a solid sales foundation, build trust and improve online sales results from day one.

Contact the MONA team through HOTLINE 1900 636 648 or click the link below to get direct support right away!

Those are some of the difficulties of selling online that any business or individual just starting starting an online business will face. Understanding them lets you prepare solutions in advance and keep unwanted results to a minimum.

Of all these difficulties, the one that quietly costs shop owners the most is relying entirely on marketplaces and social networks: when a platform changes its algorithm or locks your account, your sales channel is gone. With your own website, customer and order data stay in your hands. If you want to build your own channel, see here.