4 Steps To Building An E-Commerce Website
Starting an eCommerce business is hard work. To be successful, you must continually evaluate your site, your sales, and your profits. Before you start building an E-Commerce Website, you need to consider how you sell your products. Think about if your products offer color choices, size choices, use a sliding price scale, and how many items will be included in a typical order.
Choosing a domain name and hosting
You have to choose a domain with your important product keywords keep in mind.In the beginning, you won’t need a big hosting account or web server. Use a shared web hosting account where it’s possible to expand web space and bandwidth. It’s much easier to upgrade an existing account then moving to another host.
If you need to build your brand, you should find a unique name that people will remember after they read it on your online and offline marketing campaigns.
External shopping cart or complete web shop?
If you plan on selling less than 10 products ,consider using a regular website with some advanced link/form to an external shopping cart application.
For a larger and more dynamic products , full-featured eCommerce solutions are your best choice. Prestashop ,Woocommerce , Magento are some of the great open source projects that provide free or low cost programs to run a web shop. All of them are very powerful and have many modules to build exactly what you need for your web shop. Their modular design allows even non- programmers to easily implement additional features.
Online Payments
For an online business to be successful, it is very important to offer the right payment methods.Once you establish some baselines and know your average number of monthly transactions, be sure to check the other online payment providers to see if they offer better rates. Don’t forget to check what services the bank where you have your business account offers as well.
Styling your E-Commerce Site
The quickest and cheapest solution to finding a unique design for your web shop is to start with one of the many available pre- designed templates and make the necessary modifications to make it your own.
By using one of the free shopping cart applications, you should be able to invest in a professionally designed template. You will have a much easier time of customizing your online shop if you choose a shopping cart template before you begin customization.