While there are many differences between online ecommerce businesses and traditional brick and mortar stores, there are a lot of similarities, too.

Think about some of the most obvious things that would make you not want to shop at a traditional brick and mortar store:

• High prices
• Dirty store
• Unfriendly and/or pushy salespersons
• Lousy customer service
• Messy and disorganized, hard to find anything
• Bad location

All of these showstoppers can be applied to online stores, as well!

Who wants to shop where the prices are astronomical, especially now? Everybody in business wants to make a profit, naturally. But you can’t throw out the baby with the bath water. If you set your prices unreasonably high—so high that no one will buy from you, then zero sales equals zero profit, right?

Your online store will turn people off if it’s sloppy. Misspelled, poorly written, ungrammatical web copy is the equivalent of a brick and mortar store where nobody has swept the floors or washed the windows in ages. Make sure that your online store is “clean” and tidy!

You might wonder how an online merchant or salesperson could be unfriendly. It’s simple: If your web pages, checkout process and every phase of  doing business with you isn’t geared to be user friendly, then it’s the same as a disinterested or unfriendly salesperson in a brick and mortar store. Ditto for pushy-ness. If you are laying on so much overblown hype that your online customers need hip boots and a shovel to dig out of all that manure, it’s no different than a pushy, clingy, very annoying sales clerk following a customer around in a regular store.

Lousy customer service is lousy customer service, be it in a traditional store or in cyber space.

If your search function and links don’t function in the most user friendly ways possible, or if your products are poorly organized and hard to find, it’s no different than going in a disheveled store where items are strewn around on the shelves higgledy-piggledy, with no rhyme or reason. Who would want to take the time to try and find what they want? It’s a shopping trip, whether actual or virtual, not a scavenger hunt.

As they say in the real estate biz: location, location, location. If your online store is using a free domain that doesn’t work right half the time, or if you have named your business and domain some off-the-wall, obscure thing that nobody would ever think to search for—then you are going to enjoy about as much success with your ecommerce store as a brick and mortar store would have in downtown Nowhereseville, population 11.

To avoid losing customers, employ some of the common sense tactics that you would use in a traditional store!