What is e-commerce website development?
What is e-commerce website development?
An ecommerce website is an online store where you can sell products or services online and take credit card or debit payment through a payment gateway such as Stripe or Paypal. 10 Steps to finding the right ecommerce solution:
1. Find a product to sell
The first step to starting an ecommerce store is finding a product to sell! A few ways to start this process is to ask yourself the following questions:
- What is my passion
- What products could I sell that are related to my hobbies?
- What interests me
- What excited me
By asking yourself these questions and finding a product or range of products that are based on your interests will help you to create an ecommerce store that you will enjoy running.
“Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.”
Although, not all business’ start from passions. Other ways to find products to sell online are:
Finding a gap in the market
Offering people a product solution to solve problems they might be having
Seeing a need in a particular market
Whichever way you end up finding a product to sell, ensure that you research your chosen market and research it well. This includes both the product and the people that you are going to sell the product to on your ecommerce website.
2. Determine whether your e-commerce website is b2b or b2c
B2C (Business to Consumer) Products sold on a B2C ecommerce website are sold directly to the consumer B2B (Business to Business) Whereas products sold on a B2B ecommerce website are sold from business to business. These businesses are generally manufacturers, wholesalers or service providers.
Modern Website Design on Mobile & Desktop devices
Often, customers associate the quality of a particular product or service with the website design. Which makes a modern web design one of the most important things about designing a website. Having a modern web design helps with creating a good user experience (UX) for people who visit your website. Having a good user experience that is also mobile-friendly will make it easy for your visitors to navigate around your website to find what they are looking for, which will rank you higher in search results and give you a better conversion rate.
3. Understand your target market
Every part of your business and ecommerce website should be tailored precisely for your target market. Not only does this include your products but the user experience, website design, product description and all your digital marketing. So it’s extremely important to get to know your target market INSIDE & OUT! Some questions you might want to consider asking yourself – what’s their age? how much disposable income do they have? what competitor websites do they purchase from? Etc.
4. Choose the right business name
Choosing the right business name for your ecommerce website is one of the most important things to consider. Make sure it is concise, unique and tells your customers what you are selling.
Concise:
Make sure your business name is short and sweet. Having a business name that is more than 2 or 3 words makes it hard for people to remember and a long business name can also be tedious when creating a logo and branding.
Unique:
It’s important to check that no one else has your business name. This is important to look into during beginning stages of starting your business, otherwise, you may find that the domain name or social media pages are unavailable. Having a unique business name will allow you to purchase the correct domain name and create social media pages without having to add a hyphen or country name to the end of your business name. A good place to check a name in New Zealand is One Check.
Tell the customer what you’re selling in your business name:
It’s going to be much easier to market your ecommerce website if you have a business name that gives away what you are selling online, for example, if you are selling furniture you would be better off adding the word furniture to your name rather than having a name that doesn’t mean anything to someone who knows nothing about your business.
Example:
“Flock Furniture” instead of “Flock”
5. Lock in your domain
Before you start building your online store and product pages, go ahead and purchase your domain name. A good place to do this is GoDaddy.
6. Branding
Branding is the process of creating the “look” for your new ecommerce website! This includes logo design, colour palette, mood board and amazing product images. An ecommerce website needs to have a memorable logo and colour palette to carry throughout all digital marketing platforms. Another important aspect of your branding is your story. Your audience will want to know about you and why your company exists. When you humanize your brand, you create a connection and build trust with your customers. Thirdly, make sure you get a professional to take your product images. The images that you put on your website is whats really going to sell your products. You could have great content written and half-pie product images and you’ll be wondering why they are not selling. I can tell you now that you product images are one if the most important thing that is going to go on your website. So invest in professional product images from the start.
7. Find the right e-commerce platform
There are a few things to consider when choosing the right ecommerce platform for your new ecommerce business. Here are a few things:
Product management
Uploading product images, editing products and stock inventory should all be simple to achieve. You should also be able to put your products on sale when needed and have different variations of one product.
Shopping Cart
You should be able to customise your shopping cart so that the website design is consistent with the rest of your site.
Checkout Page
Same as the shopping cart, you should be able to customise your checkout page to tie in with the rest of the website design.
Payment Gateway
Ensure the ecommerce platform you choose can accept payment from Paypal, Stripe and Google Pay. You might also want to make sure that you can integrate layby and afterpay.
There are many different ecommerce platforms to choose from like Shopify, Magneto and WordPress. Each platform has its pros and cons and it depends on what your website needs in terms of functionality as to which platform will be best suited for your situation. If you are unsure, please get in touch with our team today!
8. Choose the right payment gateway
Choosing the right payment gateway is important because this is where credit card details are entered and this is how you take payment from your customers. You want to make sure that you choose a payment gateway that is trusted and secure so that you or your customers don’t get into trouble.
9. Content Strategy
Create a content strategy before you start the website design process. Creating content before you start on web design ensures that you have the right content, not just filler content. This means knowing your brand’s story and communicating about your products. While writing your content, answering questions that you think your customers might want to know, will be very helpful. Once you have written all your content you can design your new online store around the content that you have already written.
10. SEO Strategy
Search Engine Optimisation will help you get organic traffic to your product pages through Search Engines like Google. Having good SEO will help you get more clicks, more exposure & more sales! Some things to consider when thinking about SEO:
Content Strategy (As mentioned above)
Write about the right content. Make it relevant and helpful to your customers. Include relevant keywords to your industry – Google Keyword Planner will help you with this.
H1 & H2 Tags
Make sure you have optimised your H1 (Heading 1) & H2 (Heading 2) tags on each web page with the right content and keywords.
Meta Description & Title Tags
Implement meta descriptions & title tags for each of your web pages with relevant content. These are what show up as snippets on Google Search so it is important to make sure they are optimised for clicks.
The above bullet points are a great starting point to improving your SEO, however, much more does go into optimising a website for search engines. If you are interested in showing up on page 1 of Google for relevant keywords, get in touch with us today.
By following the above steps you should be able to start up an ecommerce website! Sleepi Digital is happy to provide you with an ecommerce solution to help you save time and money from building a website yourself. Get in touch with us today.