Linda Taylor / 6 Mins Read
Updated: October 16, 2025
Marketplaces Amazon can be an asset for the bottom line since they address your products to millions of interested shoppers. But a huge audience also means that mistakes can be blinding and costly.
The world’s largest e-commerce marketplace, Amazon, operates in 16 countries, including India, Japan, Germany, and Turkey. With a million sellers alone in the US, Amazon is constantly leveraging technology to simplify the online selling experience. While other marketplaces are following Amazon to create a smoother seller experience, the sellers fail to make the most of every opportunity.
A Business2Community reveals that “65% of all e-commerce returns are due to mistakes from the retailers themselves”. With 80% of sellers selling on platforms outside of Amazon, mistakes like shipping wrong products and inaccurate portrayals of products online are common.
Apart from these innocuous hiccups, other online selling mistakes that can render a business obsolete are:
A lot of entrepreneurs go on their creation spree when starting a business. They build varied attractions related to their business, but fail to check whether there is an audience for them or not. Market research helps you understand the following things about your customers:
You don’t know who you are selling to: Without market research, you will never discover the age of the audience your product is best suited for. A slight age variance in your target audience can affect your online campaigns. With proper research, you can design campaigns that hit the bull’s eye and bring you favorable results.
You try to sell to a non-existent audience: Not knowing who you are selling to and trying to sell to no one are perhaps the two biggest sins of selling online. When selling to an audience that doesn’t exist, you create content that no one will read, hence no one will convert.
Every e-commerce marketplace follows a one-seller, one-account policy, but to achieve better results and avoid tax implications, people often create multiple accounts. As the leading e-commerce platform, Amazon now leverages IP Detection technology to weed out such sellers.
Sellers create multiple accounts to acquire the “Buy Now” button, which is wrong and unjust to genuine sellers. By creating multiple accounts, these individuals often coax genuine sellers into offering heavy discounts that threaten their business.
Creating multiple accounts can lead to the following:
A product description is undoubtedly the best way to impress buyers. Through these descriptions, sellers can provide the necessary information about the product and help customers make better decisions.
Using product descriptions provided by manufacturers is perhaps the most common mistake sellers make when selling online. Since the manufacturer also sells these products on its online store, using the same product description is a clear case of plagiarism.
Freshly created product descriptions increase conversion rates and improve bracketing, which is one of the biggest e-commerce pain points sellers face.
Duplicate content on the site impacts in the following ways:
Not investing in building an impressive catalog is one of the biggest mistakes sellers make. A quality catalog not only impresses customers but also offers a much-needed understanding of the product. With high-quality images from multiple angles, sellers can let customers check whether the product has the required features.
Some of the common mistakes sellers make with catalog images are:
A Business Today report claims “almost 20% of the products sold on e-commerce portals are fake”. The increasing penetration of fake and imitated products on marketplaces has worried consumers.
When fake products are delivered, the overall return rate increases, further eroding marketplaces' profits. Counterfeit products not only impact the enterprise’s bottom line but also impact the customer's lifetime value.
Now, buyers want to be 100% sure the product is authentic before ordering. By letting customers post photo reviews, sellers can confirm interested buyers about the product's authenticity.
Customers often click exquisite product photos and share them on social media. Using these images as part of your social media campaign, rather than stock images, can help sellers generate more interest and receive more orders.
Online sales during holiday and festival seasons are an opportunity for sellers to do some good business. While these sales appear lucrative and beneficial for buyers, sellers can make the most of these sales when planned efficiently.
Big players like Amazon and Flipkart send mailers 60 days in advance for such sales, which is enough time for sellers to plan, build inventory and create marketing plans. Many sellers see these sales through a negative lens, pulling them away from great opportunities.
Stock in advance: When you start preparing for such sales in advance, you have enough time to make changes and plan your marketing campaigns.
Stop selling a day or two before the festival: If worried about return rates, stop selling then. Since products ordered on the day or a day before Christmas won’t reach on time, their chances of getting returned or canceled are very high. Stop selling or mark the product “out of stock” a day before the festival to avoid heavy losses.
Ship as soon as you can to avoid last-minute cancellations: It is true that during holiday sales, many products are either canceled or returned. To avoid paying for returns, ship as soon as you receive an order. Faster shipping makes people stick with the product even when it's available for a cheaper price on other platforms.
Wave shipping charges during holiday sales: Bulk orders will fill the financial gap left by waiving them. Waiving shipping charges during holiday sales and lowering cart abandonment rates for your product will increase your order volume.
All marketplaces maintain a set of rules and regulations to ensure the smooth functioning of the platform. This set of regulations offers every seller a fair chance and varied growth opportunities.
Sellers pay very less attention to these policies when selling online and commit irreparable mistakes, like:
In the excitement of starting to sell online, sellers often pay no attention to pricing structures and later regret it. Closing fees, delivery charges, and storage costs add up to a headache; hence, getting well-versed with the pricing structure before listing products is a must. A seller must find out the following before selling online:
Amazon’s price calculator lets sellers estimate the revenue they generate from selling on its platform. Almost every marketplace has one such calculator; check them out before listing your product.
Note: These price calculators often double as tools for finding the most profitable products to sell online.
Buyers often want to engage with sellers to better understand the product. With electronic items, contacting the seller allows buyers to learn how the product works. A quality post-sale service allows sellers to:
Things to avoid when dealing with customers online:
Since marketplaces are customer-centric, one complaint and you can be banned from selling online. Hence, when dealing with customers online, never do the following things:
The emergence of multiple marketplaces has prompted big players like Amazon, eBay, and Flipkart to adopt competitor benchmarking. Price matching is a common practice; marketplaces match the price of a popular product to prevent loyal users from buying it on other platforms.
Sellers who do not opt for dynamic pricing miss out on every opportunity created by competitor benchmarking. Keeping prices static makes buyers lose interest and increases cart abandonment rates.
On average, 3,300 new sellers join Amazon daily, bringing in new products. If you do not work to improve the overall customer experience through your offerings, you will fail to survive in the cutthroat competition.
Avoiding the 10 common online selling mistakes can help sellers hold their ground. By leveraging user-generated content, dynamic pricing and a quality catalog, sellers can create an incomparable shopping experience for buyers and retain their spot.
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Linda Taylor is an experienced business and marketing consultant with MattsenKumar LLC. Linda’s vast exposure in growing B2B SMEs, E-commerce and improving Customer Experience enables her to create quality content in the form of Articles and Infographics. With a focus on benefiting the masses, Linda is creating content that adds value and routes companies towards success.
