How to build an eCommerce website- A useful guide!
As an entrepreneur or someone who is getting into managing their own business online, an eCommerce website is a great way to grow your business. An eCommerce website only makes it easy to facilitate any kind of business, but through an online medium. Setting up an online store will only help you reach a wider audience and manage your transactions, information and increase your brand’s presence.
If research is anything to go by, there are about 12-24 million eCommerce sites around the world and this only keeps increasing. The increase is mainly because of the ease of making money only. So let us first understand what an ecommerce website is and then move on to how to build an eCommerce website.
What is an eCommerce website?
Ecommerce websites help one understand the nature of purchases and also the shopping habits of a customer. Also, these websites offer a myriad of things and it all depends on the type of business model you have. From selling digital products to physical products like home décor, essentials etc.; there’s a host of things one can purchase only. Likewise, for a business to work online, there are different types of segments that one can look into. They are:
- B2B- Business to Business
- B2C- Business to Consumer
- C2C- Consumer to Consumer
- C2B- Consumer to Business
Depending on what you are looking to achieve, your business model should fall into that specific segment. These are things that you will need to figure out in the budding stages of your business. It only helps to get some clarity on how you want to go about it and what it holds for you in the long term.
Moving on from here, let us look at how to build an ecommerce website so that you don’t face any glitch in the process.
Purchase a Domain Name & Ecommerce Web Hosting
This is one of the few essentials that you need for building an ecommerce website. Get yourself a domain name that you want your customers to identify with and also remember easily. All you need to ensure is that it is unique and is on the same lines as your business idea. Next is to get a reliable hosting provider for your domain name along with a suitable extension to make it live. Best is to research your hosting provider before making the purchase. We Recommend you Bluehost Web hosting Platform for your eCommerce website.
Pick a suitable platform
Choosing the right ecommerce platform can be challenging as well as confusing. That being said, you need to see what works best for your business and how you can keep the momentum of your store up.
Site layout
The development of your website is very crucial as it can be a deciding factor for a customer on whether or not to go ahead with the purchase. Not only should it be well-designed but it should also be user-friendly. User clear and high quality images, categorise your products well and also provide clear and concise descriptions.
The details that you provide about the product are what will help the customers take a call about whether or not they want to buy it. So keep it brief but make sure it is effective.
READ THIS- FunnelArk – Learn Website Development From Home
Testimonials
Reading about a customer’s experience regarding your brand or about the product, kind of has an impact on the potential customer. Posting testimonials can only help a new customer make an informed decision and can also motivate them further.
Payment gateways
In most cases, websites cater to different types of people and are spread across different audiences. This is why you should have different modes of payment available to your customers. COD, net banking, credit/debit cards are great options that you can provide to your audience.
Website speed
Work on the speed of your website, if it is slowing down the whole experience for your customer. Studies show that most bounce rates go up if the website takes more than 5 seconds to load, making customers abandon the site altogether.
Mark of trust
Display a trust-mark logo on your website. This in some way helps you gain the trust of your consumers and ensures loyalty to your business in the long run.
Conclusion
Well, there is a lot of work involved when you want to set up an ecommerce website. That being said, all the effort is totally worth it and only helps your business grow. It also makes it easier for you to gather information, process orders and engage with customers. Having a good content management system in place, also drives the traffic in a rather organic way.
So, we hope you have some takeaways from this post and it will help you in your business. An ecommerce website is your key to growing your business, so get started now!