E-Commerce Process: How to start your eCommerce Online Shopping Cart Site
Considering an e-commerce online store website can be overwhelming. Weather you are starting a new business or deciding to take your existing business online, we provide you with a list of key points to consider before starting.
1. How is an E-Commerce Online Store Different from a Regular Website?
An e-commerce online store can be compared to a complex filing cabinet which contains multiple drawers and multiple dividers within each drawer and further segregated by a variety of files. A regular website can be considered as a single page of paper. While the single page of paper can contain lots of information, the complex filing system contains much more information and has many pages related to other pages.
Typical e-commerce online stores are creating using complex coding and utilizing a database to store all the information.
2. Select the Right Shopping Cart Package
To sell products on your online store, you need to be able to easily add content to describe your business, create a catalog of your products or services, provide shipping options, collect payments, manage inventory and have a user friendly interface. Make a list of your "must-have" features or functionality vs. "nice to have" options. This will help you decide which e-commerce solution to select.
3. Design a User Friendly Online Store
When selecting a design for your online store, your primary focus should be to make it easy for customers to find what they're looking for. To achieve a user friendly e-commerce online store, consider these design guidelines:
- Use solid colors or gradients. Avoid patterned backgrounds.
- Display your company's name or logo and tagline prominently.
- Create a simple and obvious navigation.
- Use high resolution product images with a transparent background.
- Use terminology which is relevant to your customers and avoid "internal lingo".
- Provide your customers with lots of information about your products and services.
4. Build Consumer Confident Your Online Store with Secure Safe Transactions
As an owner of an online ecommerce store, you are responsible to ensure your customers' financial data is protected and secure. The e-commerce solution you select must support these industry security standards for privacy and security. Today's online consumer must feel confident shopping on your online store. Any reservation by your consumer and they will abandon your website and visit the competition. Some tips to ensure consumer confidence:
- Install a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate to encrypt the data transfer of transactions and to display the "https" and padlock symbol in the browser that customers look for when shopping online.
- Prominently display your store policies regarding refunds, exchanges, cancellations and shipping. The more confident your customers feel while shopping on your site, the more inclined they will be to make a purchase.
- Install McAfee Secure Daily Vulnerability Scanning to scan and detect any vulnerabilities on your web site server. Research proves that your consumers will be more confident shopping on your site resulting in increased online sales (over 1,000 ROI studies).
5. Promote and Market Your Online Store
As with any business, the 3 most important factors of success are location, location and location. The same holds true with an online store. One aspect of marketing your new online store will be your offline efforts such as business cards, newspaper ads, and flyers. Unfortunately print material advertising is very costly. Advertising online means you need to be located and ranked highly in search engine results when a customer enters a keyword related to your product or service. This is known as search engine visibility, search engine optimization or SEO.
You may also consider buying sponsored ads on search engines like Google® and Yahoo!® for instant results. This program is called pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
