The Impact of Errors on Online Sales in 2022

E-commerce industry growth

Competition is increasingly fierce in the e-commerce market.

According to Statista, the e-commerce industry had a turnover of over 825 billion euros at the end of 2022 and is estimated to grow to 1200 billion euros by 2025.

It is no longer enough to simply have a version of your online store in the languages of your potential customers, it is now necessary to pay the utmost attention to detail, as much to visual aspects as to content.

When you sell online you want your offers to reach users in the smoothest and direct way possible.

That’s why you invested so many resources in developing and optimizing your e-commerce, but sometimes without putting enough emphasis on the quality of the texts.

Given the amount of information that users are constantly bombarded with, their attention span is limited. Thus your message must be as precise and neat as possible, otherwise it will lose all its strength and purpose.

Websites have now become storefronts for products and services on sale, and e-commerce pages the shelves for our customers to go shopping. If your online presence fails to reflect and highlight the quality of your products, you risk losing potential customers to your competitors, even if our website is dutifully following all SEO guidelines.

In fact, it has been shown that precise style and error-free texts can be decisive in purchasing choices, with an impact equal to or greater than other factors.

Speak the customer’s language well

If I’m selling to you, I speak your language. If I’m buying dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.*

(*) “then you have to speak German.”

Two surveys of more than 2,000 consumers from 10 different countries, carried out in 2006 and 2014 by the US consultancy firm Common Sense Advisory, compared the behaviour and buying preferences of website users in their own languages and in English, reaching two different conclusions.

The first was that most people preferred to make purchases in their own language. An important figure is that over half of the respondents (55%) only made purchases on websites where information was presented in their language. Among the consumers who stated that they felt more comfortable buying in their own language were those from France, Germany and Japan.

The second statistic to come out of this analysis was that language has a significant impact on the most important purchases. The vast majority of users (85.3%) consider that having product information available in their own language is a critical factor in the purchase decision process. However, the more important an item is, as is the case with insurance and financial services, the more likely it is that customers will want to learn more about it and buy it in their own language.

So how does the quality of your writing affect your online success?

Poorly written texts = fewer visits and worse ranking

There’s no denying that first impressions matter. If your content is plagued by por grammar, it’s likely that people will think twice about the quality of your products or services. By presenting readers with sub par content, you are putting your business at risk of losing valuable word-of-mouth marketing. Or worse, you’ll be subject to negative word-of-mouth attention.

According to a study conducted by the CXL Institute, a training platform specialised in marketing, typos have a negative effect on the number and duration of visits to your website. This is mainly due to technical factors (positioning in search results) and mediocre user experience: search engines penalize poor quality content and users leave too soon.

Experts agree that since Google and other major search engines are text based, the quality of text content has a strong impact on the ranking of search results. Without a doubt, Google’s algorithm prefers error-free texts, as is explicitly stated in the Introductory Guide to Search Engine Optimization published within the Google Search Central portal (see image).

Anyone who overlooks this aspect will find themselves at a great disadvantage.

Poorly written texts = fewer sales

Secondly, if there are errors in the text, users won’t find what they’re looking for:

A particularly poignant case is that of the online store TightsPlease (currently no longer active), which specialized in the sale of stockings and tights. According to US consultancy firm Practical Ecommerce his e-commerce outlet found that poor spelling had a negative effect on its transactions.

They realized that the word “Tihgts” had been used on the tights page; and the page was losing money as a direct consequence. Once the error was corrected, transactions increased by 80 percent.

So clearly spelling also affects conversion rate.

Poorly written texts = worse brand image

Last but not least, an impression of carelessness and lack of credibility means shorter site visits: a London-based digital communications agency surveyed 1,003 users and found that nearly half of respondents (42.5%) were more influenced by spelling or grammar mistakes than by any other factors.

Source: Infogram

Conclusion publish well-written texts!

Your marketing efforts rely increasingly on the written word, and the textual content of our web pages is now within reach of a very demanding international public.

In order to be competitive in the e-commerce market, it is essential to speak your customers’ language and focus on the appearance and usability of your website.

However, the risk is that your investment in web development, copywriting, translation and adaptation will be cancelled out by errors that have a negative effect on both search engine positioning and the image your website gives off, significantly reducing the number of visits and time spent on it.

Since your message needs all the strength it can get to reach your target customers, both spelling and grammar mistakes weaken it in many ways, as well as undermine the customers’ trust in your brand.

On the one hand they tend to distract the user, slowing down reading and causing them to lose interest. At worst, on the other hand, they can even change the meaning of a sentence, create confusion, or give off the wrong message.

If you want to know the most effective way of guaranteeing the quality of your online presence, you will find the solution is at your fingertips: hiring the services of professional translators and proof-readers.