If you are going to survive and be a long-term success in e-business, then you need to be aware of the most common mistakes and pitfalls that can ruin your best-laid plans. Whether you're new to e-commerce or have a well-established site, learn how to avoid the ten common pitfalls of online entrepreneurs

Your ability to gain the trust of your visitors is the key to success on the Web. As Ron Zemke and Tom Connellan in their book "E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers - When the Competition is Just a Click Away" advise, "Convincing the buyer that you are trustworthy is the first and largest hurdle every e-commerce site faces to secure the first and most crucial sale."

How can you win a customer's trust on the Web? The first barometer customers use to judge your online business is your web site's design. All the elements of your web site's design - navigational structure, product presentation, copy and testimonials, proof of security - converge to give your visitors an overall impression of your business. The look and feel of your site allows your visitors to form their own judgment of trustworthiness.

To be able to convince visitors to take out their credit cards and spend on your site, you must design your site from a shopper's point of view. It is essential to a have well-designed interface, with a professional looking, marketing-oriented and easy-to-use page layout. You must make sure that every graphics; text and technology used works to your advantage, rather than losing sales opportunities.

You must make it easy for your visitors to find your products with a clear navigational structure. A cluttered web page makes it difficult for visitors to see what you have to offer or figure out how to place an order. All links must work and lead to the right page. The content of your online store must also be updated regularly, to give the impression that someone is actively minding the store.

Think and constantly rethink your web site's design: any misstep can make your customers suspicious or fearful, and you can kiss them goodbye.

"Web usability," a concept that has gained a lot of ground in the past year, is all about making the right first impression. More than having a good web site design, your site must be both useful and usable for your audience. Your site must perform the function for which it was designed, with the minimal amount of user frustration, time and effort.

Jakob Nielsen, author of "Homepage Usability: 50 Web Sites Deconstructed" emphasizes four points to increase the usability of your web site:

a. Make the site's purpose clear. This entails clearly explaining what your site is all about. If you are selling home furnishing items from the Middle East or pashmina shawls from Nepal, include a one-line tagline that would summarize what your company or web site does. This will immediately tell first-time visitors what they can expect and buy from your site. Also be sure to provide additional corporate information should your visitors want to know more about your business and who you are.

b. Help users find what they need. This involves making everything obvious, ensuring that every vital link and tool is accessible on every page. Your visitors should be able to go to their shopping cart, shopping categories, search field, and customer service easily from any page of your site. You also need to anticipate how your customers will use your site, and be prepared to offer them the search technology that they need. They may want to search your site by price to allow them to select only those products that they can afford, or you may want to present them with suggested gifts for different occasions.

c. Reveal site content. Your customers should be able to see your best offerings immediately. In your homepage, present pictures of some of your best-selling or most recent products. If you are running a special promotion, such as free shipping for orders $100 and above, display it prominently on your homepage and create a link where the customer can read more about it.

d. Use visual design to enhance, not define, interaction design. You may think that online bells and whistles such as Flash homepage, interactive text that blinks or spins may sound exciting, but everyday users are staying away in frustration. If you wanted to buy something from a site, I'm sure you wouldn't want to go through countless animations and slow to load pages to make a purchase. Use meaningful graphics that will not compromise your site's loading time.

The key is to get feedback and outside perspective from other people - whether family, friends, or customers - to help you evaluate your site's development and performance.

Your customer can leave your site in a blink of an eye. Confuse them with your navigational structure, and they leave. Ask too much personal information for them as soon as they arrive at your site, and they click their mouse to a different site. Make it difficult for them to order, and they may not bother coming back.

Customers buy online because it is supposedly faster, at times cheaper, and more convenient than driving to the store. They come to your site primarily to look for products that fit their needs quickly and easily. Put an obstacle early on, and you may not get them to order anything in your site.

What are some obstacles to shopping? The main factors that negatively affect the growth of online shopping include credit card fears; failure to trust online vendors; fear of misdirected merchandise or receiving the wrong items; or having to return merchandise. Note that these are common consumer fears that affect all e-commerce sites.

Consumers also quickly abandon sites whose pictures take forever to download. Zona Research estimates that more than $4 billion annually, or $362 million per month, are lost due to unacceptable download speeds.

Buyers are also irked when the information they need is not immediately presented to them. You must put upfront a price with every product, and not make them drill down to the product description to know the price. Also, don't wait until the checkout process to tell them the shipping and handling costs. Many customers abandon their shopping carts because they are required to put in their credit cards before they even know the shipping costs of the products.

There is no truth to the "if you build it, they will come" notion on the Web. There are millions of web sites on the Web, and you need to create a reason and way for customers to come and visit your site. More than just customer "eyeballs," you need to be able to convert their visit to actual sales.

Similar to starting a traditional business, you need to have a comprehensive plan to help you market your business on the Web. Your plan should contain a detailed analysis of who your customers are, where can you find them, what are their preferences, and how best to entice them to buy from your site.

You then need to develop a package of strategies that will bring your potential customers to your site. Some of these strategies may include search engine optimization, pay-per-click search engines, affiliate and pay-per-performance programs, banner advertising, offline advertising, press releases and other promotional strategies. All the strategies that you use should be carefully measured, to tell you which strategy gives the best sales per capita so you can focus on them.

Not serving your customers well can have severe repercussions to your online business. Treat your customers badly and you can be sure that they will never visit your site again. Worse, these unhappy customers can share their "bad experiences" with your business to a lot more potential customers through emails, chat rooms, instant messages and discussion forums. Studies have shown that dissatisfied online customers tell twice as many people about their experience than do satisfied customers.

What constitutes poor customer service? Poor service may cover site malfunctions, complaints and service disappointments. It could include not answering emails promptly, totally ignoring customer complaints and suggestions, unsecured and confusing order forms, convoluted return policy, delayed shipment of goods, vague and misleading "Frequently Asked Questions," among others. The perception that your business does not provide the top quality service could hurt even your business, and would render your most costly advertising and marketing programs ineffective.

Some of the ways you could improve on your customer service include: 

• Answer emails promptly, whether the customer is praising or your business, or not. 
• Promptly confirm orders when it is received and send out emails when it is shipped. It is also very helpful if you could encourage your customers to give you feedback on the products that they received. 
• Encourage customers to contact you by placing your phone number and email address prominently on your site. There are a lot of customers who are still not comfortable in giving out their credit card numbers online and would rather call the business to place their orders. Some e-commerce sites go even to the extent of installing some form of live support on their sites to encourage interaction with customers. 
• Read and re-read your FAQ section to make sure that everything is clear and understandable.          

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