What You Need to Consider Before Starting an E-commerce Website
You might have noticed how popular online stores are nowadays. That’s actually obvious since it doesn’t matter if your e-store comes together with a regular shop, or if it’s only a web resource by itself - having an e-commerce platform will raise the income. That’s what every entrepreneur wants, right? That’s why let us tell you how to create your very own e-commerce resource.
Are you eager to build an e-commerce site from scratch? Let us guide you by explaining step by step how to make your web-site successful providing your audience with a great online experience. We shall begin right away.
Above all, a certain action plan for an e-project must be drawn up. While striving for a decent and trustworthy e-commerce web-resource, it all starts with such plan. If not having one, how would you realize where to begin? What aspects to take into account? How to save some funds? Find enough time for devising strategies for possible income. Believe us, it’s truly worth it!
Mentioned below stages shall reflect process key points.
Steps to build your eCommerce web-site
#1. Purposes of your e-commerce platform developing
Before getting down to the designing itself, you’re to clearly define your objectives. Don’t be afraid to get too specific - the more accurate tasks you set, the greater - and less expensive - your final platform will become.
You’re an entrepreneur, the owner of your firm. Your responsibility is to figure out what to sell your goods & services online, what to anticipate from the web-resource, how it shall look…
To better determine your goals, find responses to below questions:
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Which type of site do you intend to get?
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Is it going to be solely online resources or do you own a regular store which you’d like to support through Internet solutions?
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Which shipping methods will you apply?
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What about the size of your website? Would you like to scale it later?
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What’s with the budget? Will it be enough to make a fully-fledged platform or an MVP version for a start?
Surely, there could be many more questions to consider every detail, however, those above are pretty good to start with.
If you clearly see your ultimate web product, you’ll handle every task in a very productive way. Failing such, you won’t find common ground with developers, as you won’t be able to describe them your expectations. Then, most probably, you’ll get frustrated with the outcome.
Before getting down to eCommerce website development itself, get clear on your objectives. It’s imperative.
#2. The name of your domain & web hosting
Pretty often the importance of those two aspects gets underestimated, which is a big mistake. Let’s pay due to attention to learning more about them.
A proper domain name is catchy and simply pronounced. It matters, cos it concerns your company brand. Ensure that your name hasn’t been occupied by another company. That could be pretty challenging. While registering it, be prepared to see the “given name is already registered” notification. Have you faced such issues before? Then you know how critical it is to think through everything beforehand. That’s okay to seek assistance from godaddy.com, whois.net, and similar platforms.
Hosting is to take care of your web solution adequate operation. You could go for one of the followings:
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Shared Hostings - that would be the easiest option. They help with allocating resources you require, asking a specific monthly fee for its services. The program allows its users to download files through FTP, or by means of a particular panel.
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VPS & VDS - mentioned technology (by the way, it’s Virtual Private & Dedicated Server) includes few separate virtual mechanisms placed on one physical server. Users are controlling various actions at root user levels. That’s a quite decent solution for making an e-commerce web-resource.
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Specialized Server - it’s physical machinery with particular parameters. It’s based on a certain well-equipped data processing center. The given solution will perfectly meet the needs of websites with high quantities of visitors.
#3. SSL Certification
Your eCommerce site will be engaged in customers’ financial operations, thus, reason out required procedures ahead of time. The best choice of SSL would be the one to guarantee high-level data protection using encryption and authentication techniques.
The Security Sockets Layer, or simply, SSL, protocols represent the guarantee of protection against hackers when the server interacts with users’ browsers. The SSL serves as a secure channel for transmission of encoded details over HTTPS. Data decryption demands the application of private online keys.
By installing the SSL certification protocols you’ll secure your digital product and the audience who uses it.
Taking into account validation aspects, we’d distinguish such kinds of SSL certificates:
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Validating the domain. That’s the simplest solution. It asks only the verification of a certain domain. As you can guess, it’s highly demanded;
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Validating the company. Does your reputation matter to you? If, Yes, go for this option. It’ll require a more detailed analysis that includes the evaluation of company’s processes as well;
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Expanded validation. Having such a type of certification, your site will get a green addresses bar in users’ browsers.
When you’re ready to proceed for obtaining any kind of certificates, simply get in touch with bodies issuing them. Although, when hiring professionals to design your platform, you could delegate them to deal with SSL certification authorities. When striving to ensure customers’ positive experience, the data security must be thoroughly taken care of.
#4. Payment solutions
The costs for your e-commerce platform building matter, however, what’s even more important is to ensure your web-site is eventually profitable. Then it’s critical to think through payment gateway, as well as credit cards processors.
Let’s face it: it’s pretty hard to arrange a safe payment system. There’s a long procedure to be authorized to apply the given technique. Still, there are no ways to escape from such painstaking proceedings.
#5. Promotion campaigns
Marketing and promotion are great instruments when applied wisely. There’s a great variety of means to enlarge your audience: SEO optimization, content advertisements, etc. Take a look at HARO and PitchBox, they’re useful.
Social networks are everywhere, thus, take advantage of them. Make your company’s pages at multiple platforms representing what it’s all about. Make people learn about you. Use it to provide your catalogs, for instance, and to advertise your products.
So, building an eCommerce web-resource will require the integration of extra marketing instruments that you’d better consider in advance before starting the process itself.
Ready to start? Go for it!