When you decided to explore the possibilities of an eCommerce website business, you will start with contemplating how you are going to make your products or services available to the internet users. Joining the market places is certainly one choice you could explore, on the whole, we will focus without anyone else website with an online store.

For big businesses, having their very own ecommerce website is a significant step. Alternatives do exist and offer plenty of exciting opportunities, however having your website helps you with creating a compelling presentation, a brand and an image that you want your business to be identified with.

Regarding having an eCommerce website, you should explore different solutions from website facilitating to eCommerce integration, shopping truck, and payment gateways.

A few words about Website

First of all, you should create a website. The most widely recognized choice is picking one of the CMS stages. Stages, for example, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, have a large percentage of websites. These stages are free. They are chiefly popular because they are quite simple and clear. You needn’t bother with any coding experience because every one of the features are already inherent or available as modules and extensions.

Other things that can be very helpful is provided documentation, resources, just as the network of those using the same stage to exchange experiences. Furthermore, CMS stages are more often than not fully informed regarding the current industry benchmarks, which means that they are SEO and mobile-friendly.

In eCommerce business, the website is your place to sell, which makes it the most important part of your eCommerce business. It is the place where your customers will get to learn about your products, to interact with you, get feedback and eventually buy. Therefore, your website should be:

• Engaging for the users to start interaction
• Helpful for them to rapidly find data
• Responsive for both desktop and mobile users
• Effective to persuade visitors to buy

Your website should have:

• Homepage
• About us
• Blog
• Shop
• Privacy policy
• terms and condition

The majority of the pages, apart from the shop, are created on the real stage you choose. When creating each of them, consider best SEO practices and how to optimize each page to make it SEO-friendly.

Create Your Store

When it comes to the actual store, this is the eCommerce website section of the website which requires eCommerce platform integration. Picking one over the other stage involves preferences, business needs, and budget. In the following chapter, you will find suggestions on the most popular eCommerce stages at the moment and what sort of features you can expect from each of them.

To make the store completely useful, you should integrate specific features that enable the online buying process. Sometimes, these features are already available as a part of the stage itself, but some stages will require extra establishments and integrations to make everything work.

Product Information

Product data hugy affects the performance of your website, on your ability to engage the visitors, to convert them into customers and eventually complete a sale. The way you present the product can make or break your business success.

Product Image

Images are necessary for having an eCommerce website. It is enough for customers that they are unable to feel the genuine product, but not seeing it too means that they will most likely be reluctant to buy by any stretch of the imagination. Product images should be very vivid and depict the features correctly. eCommerce websites more often than not provide a couple of images for a product.

Name

Choose a descriptive product name that the customers can easily find and relate to the actual product. Abstain from using such a large number of random capital letters or numbers. Although this might be helpful with tagging product for your purposes, the customers can just find it confusing.

Description

The description should provide more data about the product or service. It is a piece of text that provides more details, highlights particular features or explains how the product is applied, used, etc. The purpose of this text is for the viewer to get more acquainted with the product features and how buying this product can be useful and down to earth.

The length of the text should be ideal because you would prefer not to overwhelm the customers with irrelevant text. Since this text is also helpful in terms of SEO, it tends to be quite useful to have more content in the product description. After all, this is the segment based on which the search engines are going to index and rank the page. However, always have in mind that the page should be user-friendly.

Furthermore, it is recommended not to use the same product description for the multiple products. Despite the way that it may be easier, and sometimes logical to do as such, you should avoid this practice. Right off the bat, because of your customers, but more importantly, because of the search engines. Search engine crawlers will use your website content to understand how to index it and when to show such content as a response to a user query. Using repetitive product description will make this activity more difficult for them.

Fields and buttons

Besides the actual products, you will most likely use extra clickable buttons and fields to make the purchase process simpler. Some of the normal items you should include are the following:

• Color
• Add to bag
• Quantity
• Product size
• Store locator

Those and comparable data can be provided about the product if you believe that this data would benefit the customers and provide a better user experience.

At last, the button that directly leads the customer to the next step, to the shopping truck, is the most prominent one. This is the reason why it is more often than not in a differentiating shading. It is an action button that invites the customer to complete the shopping, generally using the verbs, for example, buy, add to truck, order, etc.

Order information

Order information is another field that can be used to improve the customer experience. With this choice, you enable customers to provide extra information about the order, just as to screen the status of their order. These features are commonly used as integration with the eCommerce stage.

• Order notes which can be customized – This way the users write comments or specify any information related to their order.
• Tracking the order – An extra integration can enable customers to follow their order status, from the moment they have paid for until the item is delivered.

Shopping cart

A shopping cart is a software that allows the internet users to browse and eventually buy the product by placing it in a virtual basket. Adding a product to cart means that the customer is interested in buying that product, but he or she will continue purchase once they are finished with perusing the website. Besides putting away product information, shopping cart also represents a direct link to the checkout process, where the user actually starts the process of purchasing.

There are two types of shopping carts you can use for the website:

Licensed shopping cart

Then again, having a licensed shopping cart allows more flexibility and customization alternatives, allowing you to tailor the shopping cart based on your needs. Despite the fact that this is a great furthermore, a licensed shopping cart comes with higher expenses, and it for the most part requires more technical knowledge for implementing and fixing potential issues.

Hosted shopping cart

This cart is provided by the outsider organization that provides the solution that is completely hosted without anyone else servers. They are in charge of system maintenance just as upgrades. While these may be advantages especially desirable by beginners in eCommerce, a hosted shopping cart involves customers being directed to another space for payment processing.

This is a downside since changing area may create a touch of doubt among the customers. In any case, this solution is a recommended option for beginners because it is cheaper than the second solution and it demands less time for management.

Shipping

Amid this phase, the customer will also learn about shipping expenses and shipping methods that are available. Since shipping costs are the most widely recognized reason for shopping cart abandonment, you could consider offering free shipping. A commonly used method is to provide free shipping on purchases that are over a certain point of confinement.

For example, if the customers buy products in the absolute worth of over $50, they are eligible for free shipping. Not only do you provide a special perk for you customers, but this practice also encourages customers to spend more in your store. Have in mind that free shipping is free for the customer, but your business should cover the expenses of shipping which depend on the bundling, carrier, insurance, tracking service, etc.

Shipping is another major qualification between an offline and online store. Customers are not able to see the products, nor to collect them, but instead, the seller is responsible for delivering the product to the customers. However, the circumstance is a long way from simple. Actually, shipping can become quite complicated for eCommerce businesses which is the reason you have to come up with a plan and strategy on the most proficient method to handle shipping.

There are several shipping models you can use in your eCommerce business. Picking which one of these to use is based on the type and size of the business you run.

Fulfillment warehouse

This option refers to using a warehouse to accept and process every one of the orders. You have the full control of the inventory, and you are able to create a significantly more consistent shipping strategy. This allows delivering products more rapidly and more efficiently.

Both of these circumstances are shipping models where you send the actual product. However, there is a third option which is called dropshipping.

Shipping yourself

The primary option is the circumstance where you send products from home. You are in charge of composing labels and bundling the product. When it comes to sending the packages, you can stroll to the post office yourself and send the package or you can have a courier pick up the packages from you and deliver them to the customers.

Payment gateway

The buying process ends with the payment gateway. A payment gateway is a services that processes payment for an online business. It is integrated into your website as an extra software. This software facilitates the transaction by transferring the information from the customer to the bank.

This service essentially handles and authorizes the payment between the seller and the buyer. Once the checkout process is complete, and the customer is ready to buy, the payment gateway is activated which is where the customer will make the transaction safely.

The process goes like this. Web browser encrypts the data which is sent to the payment processor used by the bank that handles the payment. The transaction data is sent to the card relationship to the bank issuing that card to authorize the transaction. Once this approval is received, the payment can be processed, and the approved response is generated. This process actually happens in a few seconds.

Commonly used payment gateways used by eCommerce businesses include:

• Paypal
• 2checkout
• Stripe

Website security

The last part of designing an eCommerce website will be website security. Since you expect the customers to buy from you, amid which they will experience the payment process and payment gateway, you need to consider security on your website.

PCI Standard

Firstly, there is something called Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards, which is the manner by which industry standards are defined to safeguard payment data before, amid, and after the purchase. These standards have to be followed on your server, in the shopping cart, and all through the payment gateway process. Since you are using outsider services for every one of these aspects of your business, you have this part of website security covered because those services are already PCI consistent.

SSL Certificate

SSL is the security standard that establishes an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This means that all data passes between these two is encrypted and it will remain private and integral. This convention is used by HTTPS pages to encrypt communication and keep the data protected, which is the reason it is recommended to have SSL certificate activated on your eCommerce website. Furthermore, customers are more likely to trust HTTPS websites which will encourage them to complete their purchase.

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