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Selling products on-line requires a very different setup from your run-of-the-mill blogging site. Lets look at the things you’ll need to think about when setting up an eCommerce website and help to explain why they cost more to design.

First let me tell you what we’re not going to cover in this article.

We’re not assuming that an eCommerce website is a single web page with some PayPal button codes inserted onto it.

The PayPal buttons are great and work very well for those selling a handful of items, but we’re taking eCommerce to the next level and giving the customer a better on-line shopping experience.

Most modern eCommerce website are applications. They have a user interface, administration settings, store data in a database and follow a work-flow of processes. We’re going to touch on some of these areas.

The Basics
An eCommerce website can be thought of as a play with actors performing it’s scenes.

The main actors in an eCommerce website are:

* The Customer – buys products
* The Website Owner – ships bought products & gets paid
* The eCommerce Application – interface between all the actors
* The Payment Gateway – handles payment transactions (more on this later)
* The Merchant/Business Bank Account – Website owner’s business bank account (more on this later)

The main buying process of an eCommerce website (‘the play’) happens as follows:

1. Customer browses product catalogue
2. Customer adds product to basket
3. Customer buys product and enters check-out process
4. eCommerce Application contacts a Payment Gateway
5. Payment Gateway provides secure customer shipping and payment details entry form
6. Customer securely enters shipping and payment information
7. Payment Gateway contacts Website Owners’ Merchant Bank Account
8. Merchant Bank Account processes payment transaction and returns control to Payment Gateway
9. Payment Gateway returns Customer to eCommerce Application
10. eCommerce Application notifies Customer of successful (or failed) payment
11. eCommerce Application notifies Website Owner of purchase
12. Website Owner ships product to Customer

Of course there’s a lot more detail going on in each step, but hopefully you get the general idea that setting up an eCommerce application is a tad more complicated than your regular blog-style website.

Where Do You Start?
Sounds silly right, but the first step you need to do is think about the types of things you’ll be selling on-line.

Are these products?, i.e. physical items that require packaging and posting or services provided by yourself or another provider e.g. Professional Yak Grooming.

How may products or types of services are you going to offer? Local or International? Are some seasonal? Do you have a finite stock level for particular items? Do you plan to use special offers & discounts? Do you even like yaks?

This leads to customer and payment questions.

Who are your customers? Where are they? How are they going to pay; credit card, cheque, PayPal? Which bank account will I need to set up?

And then there are the support questions.

How do you handle returned goods? How do you refund payments? How do you handle complaints?

Having a think about the products and services you’re going to offer is vital because the first thing a web designer is going to ask you when you’re requesting a quote is “How many things are you selling and to whom?”

The reason is of course time and costs.

Selling 50 products to a UK only customer base using PayPal requires a very different setup and hence costs, to one selling 1000+ products internationally and taking credit card payments.

Lets look closer at some of the important eCommerce application areas.

The eCommerce Application
Essentially, an eCommerce application is a bespoke Content Management System (CMS). So as well as updating posts and blogs it specialises in updating products and services and supporting commerce functions.

Like any CMS, the application splits the eCommerce website into two major parts; the front-end or shop-front where the customer can browse and buy goods and the back-end where you login to an administration dashboard and manage the website options, including the product catalogue.

The Product Catalogue
This will likely be your most important concern and is central to any eCommerce website design.

The product catalogue is where all your goods-for-sale data lives. The product name, description, cost, stock level, pictures etc. are all stored in here.

We sometimes get people asking which files their products are stored in and they get in bit of a tizzy when they can’t find them on the server.

Usually, product catalogues are stored in a database, but don’t worry – you don’t have to know how to use a database. The eCommerce application does that for you through the product catalogue interface in the Administration Dashboard.

Being able to manage this yourself is vital, otherwise you’ll be going back and forward to the web developer and the costs will rack up.

Thankfully, the eCommerce applications that we use, Magento and WordPress e-Commerce, once installed, allow you to manage your own product catalogue from within the web browser.

The Magento product catalogue has advanced options and allows for things like adding discount codes, customer reviews, product videos etc., whereas the WordPress e-Commerce catalogue offers a simpler solution while still covering the essential requirements you’ll need to sell stuff on-line.

So how do you go about entering and updating all this product information?

The Admin Dashboard
Accessing a special web page on your site and entering a username and password will take you to the options part of your eCommerce website. This is commonly known as the Admin Dashboard.

Here, you will be able to update almost every aspect of the website including accessing the product catalogue, shipping costs, currency exchange rates, payment gateways, sales reports etc.

Whichever eCommerce solution you choose from us, we’ll setup some or all of your product catalogue and make sure that customers can purchase items and that you get paid through a payment gateway (more on that late

The Shop Design
Of course your shop will need a look and feel to fit in with your business brand.

Again, just like other CMS’s a web designer will be needed to develop a theme or template which will transform the default shop-front into whatever design you have in mind for your customers.

Themes can be bought off-the-shelf for both WordPress e-Commere and Magento and you can apply these yourself, however, you may prefer to have a design exactly the way you imagined it and different from any of your competitors.

Themes are applied from the Administration Dashboard. You may be able to change a few aspects of the theme, such as your logo, background colour, text colour, however, you’re not going to be able to move parts of the theme around to different areas of the screen. A web designer will need to do this by updating the theme’s code.

Domain Name and Website Hosting
You will of course need a domain name to trade with and a hosting plan to store the website files and databases.

It’s usually best not to purchase a hosting plan until you’ve spoken to a web designer and they have given you an idea of the best solution to implement.

Many of the cheaper hosting plans that are offered to you when purchasing a domain name, do not support databases or database applications. They may charge an extra setup and yearly fee for setting this up.

So try to avoid buying a hosting plan until you talk to a web designer and have an idea of the type of eCommerce solution you’ll need to implement your ideas.

Merchant Bank Accounts vs Business Bank Accounts
Certainly in the UK, you must have a business bank account to legally trade as a business.

Business bank accounts can be used just fine with an eCommerce application but you will need to setup a Payment Gateway service to handle the payment transactions and get the customers money into your bank account.

If you’re opening up a business bank account and your account manager knows you’re going to be running an eCommerce website you may be offered a merchant bank account which is a specialised version of the business account.

The merchant account gives you a Merchant ID number and access to a Payment Gateway service that the bank uses or owns.

It’s likely you’ll need to pay for the setup of a merchant account and it will incur fees, usually on a per-transaction basis.

If you have already setup a merchant account then you will need to make sure your eCommerce application can support the particular payment gateway your bank has given you access to, otherwise you won’t get your money.

e.g. Lloyds TSB uses the Cardnet merchant payment gateway. Royal Bank of Scotland uses the WorldPay merchant payment gateway.

If you were a Royal Bank of Scotland business customer with a merchant account, you would need to make sure your eCommerce application supported the WorldPay gateway.

You don’t need to use the particular merchant account that your business bank offers to trade on-line, but you do need a payment gateway of some sort to handle payments.

That leads us nicely onto payment gateways.

Payment Gateways
We’ve touched on this in the previous section. Essentially, a merchant bank account will give you a payment gateway to use, but you’re limited to just the one that your business bank is affiliated with.

A payment gateway is a service offered by a company.

It handles the payment part of the eCommerce application when a customer proceeds to the checkout to purchase an item.

The payment gateway collects the customers details and payment information securely and contacts your business bank account to complete the money transaction.

This is great for security too as your customers banking details aren’t kept on your eCommerce website, so that’s one less thing to worry about securing.

There are many different payment gateway services with different features and options. As a supplied service they all charge a fee for their use. The fees can include a setup charge and a % commission of the total price of a transaction.

Some payment gateways allow you to pay a monthly or annual fee if your number of transactions are high. This can work out more cost effective for you if your single transactions are high volume but low individual cost.

You’ve probably heard of some of the more well known gateway service providers and not known what they. You’ve also likely used them without even realising they are there. Some of the popular payment gateways are:
PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay, WorldPay and ChronoPay.

It’s great that you have a choice and the services are very competitively priced so take some time to check out which is best for your business model. If you need some help, we’d be happy to meet up and walk you through the options.

Some payment gateways offer two types of general services; hosted and inclusive.

Hosted Payment Gateways
These options usually don’t require a set-up or monthly fee, however, transaction costs can be higher than an inclusive service.

The PayPal Website Payments Standard service is a good example of this.

Essentially, it limits your customers to having a PayPal account (they must register with the PayPal site) and when it comes to check-out, the customers are transferred from your eCommerce website to the PayPal website for the information gathering and payment transaction, then upon completion redirected back to your eCommerce website.

The downside of this method is really from a branding point of view. You have very limited control of how the payment gateway service, PayPal in this case, looks and operates before it redirects back to your website.

Some customers can be put off by redirecting to another site as confidence in security can be questioned (although PayPal in this instance has a very good reputation).

You’re also limiting the payment method to just those customers who are willing to use the payment gateway’s choice of payment. In this case, the customer must have a registered PayPal account.

A similar process happens if you use the Google Checkout payment gateway.

So what’s the other option?

Inclusive Payment Gateways
Inclusive payment gateways will allow your customers to go through the whole checkout process without (the appearance of) leaving your branded eCommerce website.

I added in “the appearance of” because in some cases your customers will actually leave your website and use the payment gateway service, however, the way it is implemented and embedded makes it looks as if it’s all part of your website and business brand.

So what’s the catch?

There’s usually a setup fee, a minimum subscription period (say 12 months), a monthly fee and of course a whole heap of conditions that apply.

Some particular conditions to look out for are thresholds on the number of transactions per month, or total monthly funds transferred. Payment gateway services can charge extra or insist you upgrade your service if these thresholds are exceeded in a similar way that mobile phone companies will charge you extra if you use up all your inclusive talk or SMS time.

The best benefit of using an inclusive payment gateway is that the whole customer experience from browsing to payment is hosted on your own website. This gives the customer a greater sense of confidence that their data will be kept safe and makes your whole business look and feel more professional.

A good example of this type of service is the PayPal Web Payments Pro.

Securing The Data
If you’re using a payment gateway then the good news is it’s unlikely you’ll be storing sensitive customer payment details on your eCommerce website.

Those types of data will be kept securely in your payment gateway account.

Of course you will be collecting a whole lot of other important and confidential customer information such as name, email, perhaps address, likes, dislikes, a username and password for your site.

All this information needs to be kept secure and your eCommerce application will help with that. The Administration Dashboard will have lots of sections that control who and what can see parts of the collected data.

But that’s not the only security you’ll have to think about. Do you know what happens when you fill out a form on a website and click on submit?

If you have a look at the top of the web browser in the address bar you’ll see the website’s URL address. Most sites will start with http://

(For those that want to know, URL stands for Uniform Resource Location and HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)

Any web page starting with http:// is transferring data to and from a web server in Plain Text.

This means, that the web page contents, code, images, text, form data are all sent in a format that’s readable to humans. OK, it may not be that readable, but in essence all the information is there in English characters (or whatever language character set your website uses).

Now for some more techie stuff.

When your web page is sent to or received from a web server, there isn’t a 1-to-1 direct connection between your website and the server. The web page data is transferred through hundreds of networks across different countries and through thousands of routing computers and other network devices before arriving at your computer.

This means that at any point during it’s travel, your web page data has the potential to be intercepted and read by whomever.

There isn’t much you can do about the interception part but there is something you can do to make it a darn lot harder for somebody to read and use your eCommerce web page data.

SSL Certificates
Now we’re talking.

Let’s skip the techie bit and quickly tell you what these are and what they do.

You buy an SSL certificate from a web hosting company (annual renewal most likely), install it into your eCommerce website and it encrypts your web page data. Hooorah!

You’ll now notice that parts of your website, likely those that require personal form data to be collected and sent, now start with https://

The addition of that little “s” letter, standing for “Secure”, means that the web page data is encrypted when sent and decoded only at the two end-points; your computer and a web server.

Anyone reading the page in between will see garbled non-readable characters.

You may also see additional signs of a secured web page such as a closed padlock icon.

We would strongly advise you buy an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate and get this installed and configured for use with your hosting account and eCommerce website.

In Summary
Creating an eCommerce website requires a fair amount of planning.

You’ll need a good web design and web development team to implement your business venture.

It will cost you more and take longer to create than a regular blog or brochure-ware website because of all the design and setup.

You’ll make money – and that’s what’s it’s all about after all…

We hope this helps you start your eCommerce website journey. Of course there’s a heap of things we just didn’t have the time to cover.

Learn more about eCommerce at our website.

Source by Wil Brown

From new companies to expansive ventures with well-known brands, relatively every organization is picking up an advantage from their eCommerce site where they can offer their particular items or services. In the present focused society, buyers never again search for adventures on the high boulevards to purchase merchandise or items; instead, they use online assets for their shopping accommodation.

“According to Statista report, in 2017 eCommerce was responsible for around $2.3 trillion in sales and is expected to reach $4.5 trillion in 2021.”

This is the place internet business sites gain ubiquity in the market. Numerous retailers are favoring this choice to offer their items on the web. There are immense advantages of internet business sites and here are a few motivations to pick an eCommerce platform for your business:

Extends Your Brand
Consistently the number of online clients expanded by some rate and half of them invest energy in seeking and shopping of items. Thus, web-based business site can be a viable device to expand your brand image alongside internet showcasing services and eCommerce life utilities.

This will enable you to grow your items and administrations to a full degree while making your business famous in the online commercial center.

Comfort of shopping
Have you ever wish to go out shopping late at night or have required a few products on dire premise? Online business sites are accessible every minute of every day to buy products whenever and with quick coordination, it will be an additional favorable position.

Also, individuals don’t generally have much time to go out and look through the things they need to purchase, so they go online shopping for those things. This demonstrates the online retail business is exceptionally advantageous for shoppers since it has no time requirement.

Focus on a more extensive engagement of people
Web is a huge field where you can discover billions of clients web-based, hunting down something, or creating something applicable to them. A large number of clients may look for merchandise and ventures for their benefit. Ecommerce development can take your business to them and achieve a vast amount of online clients.

Subsequently, you can focus on a substantial number of engagement of people through your web-based business and satisfy their necessities with your items and administrations. At the point when clients discover your site essential and helpful, the movement will increment and draw in more groups of onlookers.

Displays launching of services or products
There are a wide variety of internet advertising devices and practices that can be used to make your site prevalent among online clients. Internet business is where you can get best-promoting open doors that can get quality movement on your website. Most conventional advertising systems are SEO and SMO, PPC, content showcasing and some more.

To set up an eCommerce website for your business, you will require certain things, for example, a group of best eCommerce business site designers, online advertising techniques, a god spending plan and some an opportunity to actualize your thought effectively. Internet business has everything that can make your image mainstream through online assets.

After everything, you need to decide, go for something which you can control in the future when your business will expand. Don’t be in a rush. You can check our blog on things to remember before developing a website.

Read more about Magento vs Shopify: Select the best platform for your eCommerce

Source by Agustin Brown

Ecommerce is a booming sector and in an order to bloom yourself along with it, you need to design a beautiful ecommerce website on an appropriate platform or CMS. CMS stands for Content Management System that helps to build a website that works well and offer unbelievable and pleasant working experience to the users, which increase your chances of conversion. Choosing CMS wisely is hard, as having proper knowledge related to this is compulsory to pass the test. If you are overwhelmed with the options available to you, here is the list of CMS that you can take into consideration and choose according to your requirements. So, let’s have a look out the options available.

• OpenCart: When it comes to building an ecommerce website, OpenCart is the very first choice of the most of the developers. The reason behind its huge success is, it’s easy to use features, widespread community and proper backend configurations. Additionally, it offers a wide range of plugins to support the design and different categories on your website.
• Shopify: If you want to create a highly customized ecommerce website, go to Shopify CMS. It’s advanced editing features draw the attention of so many developers from all around the world. Also, it is good from the SEO perspective and has 24*7 customer support to offer, so, if one stuck at a place, they can get the help they require.
• Drupal Commerce: Drupal offers outstanding features like checkout support and receipt tracking, payment support and SEO support and to name a few. It’s the best option to use for building an ecommerce website and it won’t let you down ever.
• Magento: It is a popular CMS that is used by the developers across the globe, which meets the diverse needs of the business. Thanks to its features and highly supportive backend, which makes it easier for you to design and develop functional designs.

These are some of the common CMS that you can use for building an ecommerce website that helps you convert. You can partner with a Web Designing Company to get professional support from the experts. Always remember that to hit the goal, you first need to make your base strong, so, if you genuinely want to earn profits from the same, don’t compromise in the designing and development of your website. A professionally built website helps you build a strong presence on different platforms and can be extremely helpful for your business.

Source by Gunjan Singh

No matter how successful your eCommerce website is, you should always be brainstorming for ways to improve it. Developing innovative eCommerce promotion ideas can be tough, but will ultimately pay off in dividends when implemented correctly on your eCommerce store. Offering promotions and special offers to your potential eCommerce customers is an effective method of driving ancillary traffic to your site, acquiring new customers, and growing revenue. Best of all, these promotions can also be used to encourage new visitors to become loyal, repeat customers. Many shopping cart platforms offer these eCommerce features, so take advantage of them!

Why Are Utilizing eCommerce Promotions and Special Offers Important?

The fact is, today’s online consumers are more savvy than ever. Combine that with the fact that there are more online buying options than ever before, and it’s no surprise that it can often take additional persuading to get your visitors to click that checkout button. In that context, consider your eCommerce promotions to be one of the most valuable persuasion tools available to you.

Boosting eCommerce Sales With eCommerce Promotions and Special Offers

Now that we understand the role special offers and promotions play in an eCommerce website, we’d like to share some powerfully simple promotions that we have seen work wonders for our clients. Of course, no two sites are identical, and what works in one industry may not work in another. Before implementing any of these ideas, make sure you are poised to collect any data needed to determine their effectiveness. That way, you will have tangible evidence behind your decisions and you can make permanent changes to your eCommerce store with confidence.

#1 – Free Shipping

It’s no secret that everybody loves free shipping. Additional shipping charges during the checkout process contribute to cart abandonment, also known as the achilles heel of the eCommerce website. Apart from eliminating an expense many of your visitors may be expecting, free shipping can simplify the entire sales process.

Whether you offer free shipping sitewide or limit your promotion to specific categories and products, your customers can browse confidently knowing that the prices listed are what they’ll actually pay (plus a little for Uncle Sam, when applicable). Plus, they won’t be caught off guard with additional charges when they’re ready to checkout. From a psychological perspective, you’ll be at an advantage if your visitors are confident that the price they see is an accurate representation of their final cost.

One thing worth mentioning is that your company doesn’t necessarily have to eat the shipping costs, you can simply “hide” your shipping charges by embedding them directly into the price of the product.

#2 – Percentage Based Discounts

If brick and mortar storefronts have taught us anything, it’s that everyone loves to buy things that are “on sale”, and formatting your product pages to have a “sale price” can definitely increase conversions. Consider showing two prices for any given product, the “retail” price and your “sale price”. Experiment with different terminology such as “Suggested Retail” or “MSRP” to see what works best for your store or niche.

Even though percentage based discounts have become increasingly ubiquitous on eCommerce websites, they are still quite effective. Somehow, the human brain is still more enticed to purchase a product if an artificially inflated original price has been “slashed” down to a lower amount. Experiment with different percentages depending on your profit margins to find the percentage that is most effective for you. Any reputable eCommerce shopping cart should be able to make these adjustments dynamically, either site-wide or specific to a certain category or product. Remember to keep your profit margins in mind when creating these discounts, as increases in revenue are of the most value when you are making substantial profit on each sale.

#3 – Buy Something, Get Something Else For Free

Again, everybody loves free stuff. You can setup free product giveaways if a certain product is purchased or if sales of a specific product are dwindling.

If you’d like to increase your average order value, try adding a free product if a certain dollar amount is spent. You’ll be giving your customer the impression that they’re receiving a better value, while psychologically priming them to have a positive outlook on your company after the transaction. At the same time, it will create an incentive for them to spend more money each time they frequent your site.

#4 – Quantity Discounts

Another great way to improve sales and average order value is to offer discounts based on the quantity purchased of a specific product. These discounts can be structured any number of ways, including a flat rate, a fixed percentage, or a sliding scale.

This can be especially advantageous to eCommerce websites that are looking to sell both to the average consumer as well as distributors and merchants that need to buy in bulk. You can setup your quantity discount structure such that those looking to purchase in bulk do not have to contact you directly to negotiate a price. The more automation your website has in this regard, the more labor hours your company can allot to innovation and growth.

#5 – Offering Reward Points

Offering your customers rewards point for each dollar spent is a great way to encourage visitors to become loyal, repeat customers. These reward points can be expressed in “points” or “dollar-value”, depending on what you think makes more sense for your target market. Many believe that website visitors are more enticed to spend “50 Example.com Dollars” vs “50 Example.com Reward Points”, so keep that psychology in mind when determining how to name your points system.

Getting creative with the naming of your rewards points system also presents an opportunity to strengthen your brand. For example, “Airplane Ticket Reward Points System” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “Frequent Flyer Miles”.

When To Use Special Offers:

While most eCommerce websites are practically always running some sort of special offer, there are certain times when special offers should especially be considered.

1. Weekly / Monthly / Quarterly
2. Pre-launch (of a website, of a new product, or anything else applicable)
3. Holiday / Seasonal Promotions (Black Friday and Christmas are obvious, but also any holidays or seasons that align with your brand… e.g if you sell weight loss products, create a promotion centered around New Year’s resolutions.
4. Abandoned Cart – Target abandoned carters via email with special offers to seal the deal.
5. Email / Newsletter Subscription Offers – Include special offers and promotions exclusive to those on your email list. Advertise this on the site to encourage newsletter and email list signups!
6. Social Media Engagement Incentivisation (e.g. Like us on Facebook for a 10% coupon)
7. First Time Visitors – Create special offers for those making their first visit to your site.
8. Customer Loyalty – reward repeat customers with special offers
9. When it looks like a user intends to exit the page, you can create a special pop-up offer to entice them to stay on the site and make a purchase.

We recommend working directly with your eCommerce SEO company to help implement these strategies on your eCommerce website. Combining SEO expertise with an intimate understanding of your business is the best way to fill in the gaps from the ideas above. Furthermore, your eCommerce SEO agency will be able to align their SEO efforts with your eCommerce promotions so that your strategies can work together in harmony.

Source by Allison J Smith

Building an ecommerce website is quite different from building an ordinary site for other minor purposes. This is true because, an ecommerce website is like a virtual market place aimed at generating huge monetary returns every single moment. Hence there are various ecommerce Website Design ideas that can be have help if you desire to have one. Let’s take a look at 5 of such ideas.

Decide on the Products to sale

Before you go ahead to design an ecommerce website, you need to decide on the kind of products you wish to sale on the site. This determines the kind of design and approaches to take when building the site. In most cases, it’s better to have a specific product niche in mind for your website. Other products may be secondary and minor. It’s better for the online community to know your site for one unique product niche. This can attract more visitors and also make you to be very focused and proactive.

Use Simple business Templates

When creating your ecommerce site, it’s better to make use of simple business templates that relate to the kind of products you’re selling on the site. Don’t use heavy graphics and images as they may slow down the site when people visit it. Your ecommerce site should be as simple as possible in order to allow many visitors to be navigating it without hitches.

The Shopping Cart Must be Available

You need to create a conspicuous shopping cart on the website for customers coming to the site to buy your products. You have to optimize the “add-to-cart” button to be very clear on the site. Customers should not crack their heads before locating the icon.

Introduce Effective Payment Systems

Your ecommerce website will remain moribund and ineffective when you don’t have working payment systems incorporated in it. You need to introduce various payment systems such as credit cards, PayPal, money Booker and so on. These systems allow your customers to purchase products and pay you instantly.

Create Quick Product Review section

You need to create a section in the ecommerce site where your product reviews are well exposed. Visitors who stop by to buy products will like to know more about them before they buy. You need to have various product reviews articles written concerning all the available products you have on the site. You can easily contact a writer in a freelancer website to do the job for you.

In all, building an ecommerce website is never as easy venture. You need to be updating the site from time to time. You also need to be introducing new site features and even new products. You can always engage the services of a reliable website developer to help you out if you have a need for such.

Source by Terro White

An on-line presence is very essential for any kind of business: it is probably the most cost efficient type of advertising currently available. Numerous small businesses use the web to sell their services and products while many businesses do not actually see the web as a market. No matter what you’d like to do, inform your customers or sell products on-line, you need to know several Web site basics in order to attain success. Fundamentally there are two main types of web sites! informative and commercial. If you are only starting out, dependent on the nature of one’s company, you will either plan an educational web site meant to attract and encourage customers to ask the services or you will develop a professional web site that will sell your products online.

Some entrepreneurs create web sites which are educational and commercial, especially when they might like to encourage products which are new in the marketplace or that could bring significant advantages to the users. Overall, the Web is a marketplace and an internet site. Your most important on-line promotional tool. As a matter of fact, you must first pick a name for the domain and book that domain name. The cost of domain name varies with domain registrar and you can get cheap or affordable domain names too there, but try to avoid free domain name, which is not good for ecommerce websites. This name must be strongly associated to your business and simple to recall. Avoid long, hard domain names like! Allideasforpartydesignuk dot com or names which say nothing about your company like frght88 dot net. Again free hosting isn’t an option for serious on-line businesses.

There are lots of companies offering reliable website hosting services. If you are serious about on-line business you should select a reliable hosting company, one which offers 24 hour support and has an excellent standing. You will design your web site according to these documents. If you hire a pro, make sure she or he can design your site respecting your visual identification recommendations, the World Wide Web Consortium requirements and create the internet search engine optimised pages. Promoting your web site requires a long term marketing plan. You need to take in consideration all possible on-line marketing possibilities: from basic internet submission to PPC, submission in paid directories, news release and article submissions, web blogging and posting in forums, choose-in e-mail marketing and so forth. You will need to help keep your web site actual, or else you will lose significant points in the SERP and the visitors may be considered irrelevant, uninteresting as well as not worth another visit. Well, these are most key elements influencing your on-line success. Each element has its significance and will play a significant role to establish your site presence and usability.

Source by Rosario Berry

Increasingly businesses are shifting towards the digital world everyday. Both the seller and the consumer are online now. With increasing demand for Ecommerce Web Development, there are few things you must keep in mind before starting!

1. Responsiveness

People want convenience, they won’t waste time in figuring out a complex situation when there are literally lakhs of easy solutions available on the internet. The main thing to keep in mind while developing your ecommerce site is to make it responsive. People are on their phone always, it is important to make your website in a way it is convenient for them to operate on a mobile screen.

2. Cleanliness and Easy

Your website should be eye-catching and aesthetic to grab your target audience but don’t make it too complex for the sake of beauty. If it is too complex, the user might get annoyed and leave your site before even seeing your product. Your site should be beautiful but easy to navigate and operate.

To make it easy, your visitor should be able to get a clear and concise idea of your business and product as soon as they visit your page. Your products should be easy to find. Avoid jargons and complex words.

3. Call to Action

Your call to action buttons should be easy to use and find, so your visitor does not feel like they have wasted their time searching for products they can’t even buy. Avoid unnecessary advertisements and false call to action buttons. Help your visitors further by a live chat option or defined place to file their query.

4. Visual Images

As it is said, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Now, this is something you will have to religiously follow. Use HD and clear pictures of your products, a visitor needs to know what they are spending their money on. Use various techniques such as 360-degree view to make it more attractive and clear. If possible, use product videos to enhance your sales chance.

5. Product Information

This is the most important point that newbies generally ignore. No one is going to spend their money on something they have no idea about. Try to answer all the necessary queries, provide clear description including product material, quality and all other factors that could influence the purchase decision. Advertise your product but don’t go astray. You can also provide relevant blogs or videos for the product. Add “things you may like” or “similar products” to show you have a wide range to offer and serve consumer wants.

6. Ratings and Reviews

It is very rare for a customer to go on a site and blindly buy something without a proper research. To increase your sales chance and ease your visitors’ experience, include a rating and reviews section. It gives your visitors a reassurance and confidence that they otherwise lack while visiting a new site. It becomes a reliable source for your customers and drastically increases your sales chance.

7. Efficient and Fast Check Out

Customers absolutely hate clicking through a series of pages while checking out. If it is unnecessarily lengthy and complex there is 99 percent of chance that the customer might change their mind mid-way. Add easy options to log in or check out as a guest, add easy payment, and check out options.

8. Personalization

Thousands of vendors are selling the same products as you. It is now up to you to give customers that one key factor that will make them choose you. Personalizing your website, and giving it a unique look. Give your visitors personalized experience, add your custom features, make them feel special. Curate personalized list and preference items according to their previous actions for example “customer also bought this” or something along the lines.

To conclude, everyone is online but not all of them are successful. There is a pool of people trying to make it out successful but only a handful can do so. Make sure to keep these points in mind while creating your website to ensure maximum success.

Source by Rahul Ranjan Singh

A number of studies have shown that a large percentage of modern users prefer mobile commerce apps to ecommerce websites. Hence, your ecommerce website must deliver optimal user experience to beat competition and mobile commerce. You have to consider several factors to make the web store keep visitors engaged and seduce them to buy the products/services. In addition focusing the look, feel, features, and functionality of the website, you also need to explore ways to optimize its user experience. To optimize the user experience delivered by the website, you need to enhance its accessibility, usability, security, credibility and search engine visibility.

10 Points to Consider while Launching Your First Ecommerce Website

1) User

While planning and developing your first ecommerce website, you must focus extensively on the users and their choices. You must remember that a web store does not allow customers to touch, feel or smell the products physically. Hence, you must keep the users engaged by making their shopping experience fast and hassle-free. You can always keep the visitors engaged by offering products at discounted prices, providing free shipping, and keeping the shopping and checkout process simple.

2) Design

You also need to focus on the design and user interface of the ecommerce website to impress and engage visitors effectively. Unlike established brands, you need to explore ways to gain the trust and confidence of visitors. Hence, you have to include a number of elements in the website design – a recognizable logo, shopping deals, product options, product review and testimonials, and call to action. At the same time, you need to ensure that the look and feel of the ecommerce website is both intuitive enough to keep the purchase process simple and straightforward.

3) Mobile Optimization

As mentioned earlier, a large percentage of modern users prefer mcommerce apps to ecommerce websites. Likewise, most people nowadays access ecommerce websites on their smartphones, tablets or phablets. Hence, you need to ensure that the ecommerce website delivers optimal user experience on both computers and mobile devices. You can always opt for responsive web design to make the web store look good on each device with a single code base. The mobile optimization will further enhance the website’s visibility on major search engine results pages (SERPs).

4) Social Elements

You need to include many social elements in the ecommerce website to impress the users. The users must have option to share the products purchased from your web store with their friends through popular social networks. Also, the social elements will help users to promote your new ecommerce website and enhance its popularity. You can even use the social elements as an efficient tool to gather information about customers and track their behaviour.

5) Search Box

No ecommerce site can display all its products on a single page. But you can always impress visitors by displaying branded goods to the visitors initially. Also, you must allow customers to check your products based on specific criterions or categories. The website must allow visitors to search and find the relevant products without any delay or hassle. Hence, you need to ensure that your ecommerce site includes a robust search box. The search box will enable users to find a specific product and buy it directly, without browsing through an array of products.

6) Shopping Cart

Your choice of shopping cart will have a direct impact on the user experience delivered by the ecommerce portal. You have option to choose from an array of open source and commercial shopping carts written in different programming languages. But you must opt for a shopping cart software that enables users to check their previous and current purchases quickly and conveniently. Also, the shopping cart must allow users to add or remove items without any hassle. At the same time, you also need to enhance the accessibility and visibility of the shopping cart by using the commonly used simple basket icon.

7) Payment Options

The choice of online payment option varies from one customer to another. Some customers prefer making payment through their debit/credit cards or internet banking facility, while others opt for popular online payment options like PayPal and digital wallets. Hence, you need to ensure that each customer can make payment for the products purchased by him with any payment option. At the same time, you also need to keep the online payment and financial transactions of customers secure by using a reliable payment gateway and the latest encryption techniques.

8) Trust Marks

You must remember that a large percentage of people are sceptical about new ecommerce websites. Hence, you must explore ways to enhance the ecommerce website’s credibility and win the trust of customers. In addition to including robust security features in the web store, you also need to display the accreditation certificates and trust marks of reputed brands. The trust marks and accreditation certificates will enhance the credibility of your newly launched web store. The trust marks will further assure customers that their personal data will remain private and online transactions will remain 100% secure.

9) Option to Answer Pre-Sale and Post-Sale Questions

While buying products from a new ecommerce website, users often ask a variety of question before and after the purchase. Hence, you must answer the pre-sale and post-sale questions of customers immediately increase your sales and revenue. Like other websites, you can answer the pre-sale and post-sale questions of customers through either online chat or phone call. But the customer must be able to see the options available to clear his doubts and answer his questions. You need to ensure that the phone number or online chat option is clearly visible to each customer. Also, you must deploy skilled customer care executive to answer the pre-sale questions of website visitors appropriately and convert them into customers.

10) Search Engine Visibility

You can easily divert regular search engine traffic to the ecommerce website by complying with the guidelines recommended by popular search engines like Google and Bing. For instance, Google ranks websites based on metrics like mobile friendliness and load time. Also, it recommends entrepreneurs to build web stores with responsive web design. While planning the ecommerce website, you must keep in mind the guidelines and recommendations of major online search engines. The search engine optimized design will help you to get regular website visitors without launching expensive digital marketing campaigns in future.

You further need to assess all important aspects – user interface, functionality, performance, usability, security, and user experience – during the ecommerce website development phase itself to make it popular within a shorter amount of time. You can even consider investing in analytics tools to understand the behaviour and preferences of website visitors based on real-time information collected from various sources. However, it is also important to update your ecommerce website consistently to meet the emerging technologies, industry trends and customer preferences.

Source by Arun Kumar Biswal