Building an ecommerce website allows you to make your business and your products or services available to a worldwide market of Internet users. In many ways, the rules, limitations, strategies and key aspects of ecommerce are similar to what business owners face in traditional commerce, but you must understand apply these concepts to the online world in order to be successful there.
Choose a Domain Name
In traditional business -- especially when it comes to retail, hospitality and restaurants -- it has long been said that the three main factors of success are "location, location, location." Just as the traffic going by a storefront inevitably leads to more business, website traffic will make your ecommerce business more successful as well. One of the main ways of ensuring traffic and making your website valuable is choosing an intuitive, memorable domain name. If you want to sell Egyptian rugs, for instance, see if EgyptianRugs.com is available. Even if your desired domain name is taken, you may be able to purchase it for a reasonable price. This will bring you traffic both from people who try typing in the intuitive name and from people who find it in a search engine, remember the domain name and go back later.
Get a Web Hosting Company
For a few dollars per month, you can pay a web hosting company to make your website available 24/7 to anyone in the world who goes to that URL. However, the cheapest hosting packages offer little more than a domain name. For a little more money, many hosting companies will also throw in site-building tools and support to help you get your website up and running and performing the tasks that you want it to perform, including an ecommerce store.
Get an eCommerce Package
Your web hosting company may offer you an affordable ecommerce package. Such packages are sufficient for many businesses, but for a more specialized and fully functional ecommerce package, you may want to invest in a premium one. Some of the most highly rated ecommerce solution companies are Magento, Volusion and Z-Node (see Resources).
Build Your Website
Even if your site comes as a ready-made template -- which it should if you go with a professionally made ecommerce package -- you will still need to do a significant amount of work before you can get your business running. Take pictures of all of your products to make an attractive display. You will need to upload these digital images to your site, following the instructions of your ecommerce package. Along with the pictures, you will need to write product descriptions for everything you are selling or for services you are providing.
In building an ecommerce website, remember that the ability to accept credit and debit cards is vital to success. Any professionally made ecommerce platform should be integrable with online fee collection modules such as PayPal, Paymate and OboPay. Get an account with one of these companies so that you can accept payments online.
Advertise and Build Traffic
One of the simplest and most common ways of advertising your website is by using a pay-per-click advertising service. Such services automatically look at web content and put your advertisements on related websites for you, and you only pay when people actually click on the advertisements. However, this alone may not bring enough traffic to your website. To get high levels of traffic, you want your website to be among the first to come up in relevant search engine results. To guarantee this, you must invest in search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization is the act of creating and arranging content on your website in such a way that search engines determine that it is among the most relevant websites of its type. You may be able to read SEO guides and do it yourself, but you should also consider hiring a company that specializes in SEO to get you into the top rankings.
