Building an eCommerce brand can be challenging, and there are several aspects which can help or undermine your brand image, here are few basic things you need to take care to build and safeguard your brand.
- Your eCommerce business doesn’t have a differentiator, in the form of product, service or price: Whether it is eCommerce or brick and mortar you need differentiators to build and grow your brand, if you don’t have a differentiator, you have to work towards it and find one. Uniqueness about your product/service/price etc is what helps you create a unique image in your consumers’ mind.
- Your brand story is not consistent across channels: Multiple channels can bring in more traffic but it also means more work, in terms of making sure that all your branding activities are in sync and they give the same message to consumers across channels. A confused branding experience, can bring sales decline.
- Running offer campaigns all the time: Find genuine reasons to provide offer to consumers, too many promotional campaigns will be counter-productive and will damage your brand image.
- Selling Commodities: If you are selling commodity products (electronics, appliances, books) with no first comer advantage or scale and you are fighting price wars every day, it is neither easy to build a brand nor to sustain this business for long.
- Credibility: Biggest of all, once the consumer loses the trust on your brand, it will be hard as hell to get it back. Avoid pricing errors, repeated shipping delays and other quality and security related issues. These can irrevocably damage your brand.
- Your technology platform is not built to scale: You don’t want your eCommerce website to go down exactly when you are getting high traffic. Not having the right technology stack, environment setup can sabotage your growth plans and reduce brand trustworthiness.
- Poor Design: Your design needs to align to your brand personality, substandard design will undermine your brand and consumer experience will be compromised.
- Operation bottlenecks: Inventory errors/shortages, damaged products, erroneous and/or delayed deliveries can seriously hurt your reputation and these instances spread like fire on social media. It takes time and effort to build a brand, but couple of drops can bring down brand loyalty.
