Do you need an eCommerce website to sell your products online?
Here are but 6 essential steps that you must follow for building & running an eCommerce store:
Step #1 Think about domain name & hosting
The very first and most important step toward building an eCommerce website is to register a domain name. For eg. www.websitename.com
A domain name could be your company name or your brand name. Many people think that including keywords in your domain name will help in SEO but that’s not true. A domain name has barely anything to do with SEO.
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Once you reserve your domain name, you may also subscribe to a website hosting package.
Although you will need a server to host your website only after your web development has been completed, it would still be good if you can decide upon a reliable yet affordable hosting company.
A website hosting company plays an important role in the success of any website. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that website hosting can make or break an online business.
Step #2 Hiring a website designer or developer
The next step to building an eCommerce store is to search for and hire a professional & experienced web developer.
Again hiring a reliable web developer is the key to success in online business.
Most small businesses have budget constraints, so hiring a website developer in India could be the right choice in this case.
If you too, don’t want to spend much on your website development, consider hiring Indian web developers.
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Step #3 Choosing a CMS platform
Once you have shortlisted your web developer, you can start evaluating various CMS platforms such as WordPress to build your eCommerce website.
Every CMS platform has certain advantages and disadvantages.
If you are a newbie and looking for a robust yet easy-to-use CMS tool for your website development, WordPress is for you. When you choose WordPress for building your e-commerce store, it becomes easier for you to manage the products, orders, and fulfillment through your website.
Here are but a few major reasons to choose WordPress for your website development:
- WordPress is free to use.
- WordPress can be customized by your website developer.
- WordPress developers are easily available at an affordable price, especially in India. If you need a WordPress website at a low cost, you can consider hiring WordPress developers in India.
- Most WordPress plugins are free.
- Most of the WordPress premium themes won’t cost you more than \$100.
Step #4 Selection of a payment gateway
The next step toward eCommerce web development is to choose a payment gateway through which you are going to accept online payments.
There are many different payment gateways available for eCommerce websites, and it is important to choose the best one for your business. The right payment gateway will make it easy for customers to make purchases on your site, and will also provide security for your transactions.
Here are some of the most commonly used & popular payment gateways:
- PayPal
- eNETS
- WorldPay
- Stripe
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Step #5 Test Your Website
Once your web designer has completed your website development, the next step is to test it properly.
It’s important to test your eCommerce website properly for a number of reasons.
First, you want to make sure that the website is easy to use and navigate for potential customers.
Secondly, you want to ensure that the website is secure and able to process payments safely.
Finally, it’s important to test the website’s functionality to make sure that everything is working as it should.
By taking the time to properly test your eCommerce website, you can avoid potential problems down the road and ensure a positive experience for your customers.
Yes, before you launch your eCommerce store, you must make sure that it’s working on all the important parameters such as:
- Browser compatibility
- Mobile responsiveness
- Checkout process
- Seamless payment gateway integration
- Forms validation
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Step #6 Basic On-page SEO
If your eCommerce website has all the worldly elements but doesn’t attract any traffic to it, it’s of no use. Because the primary objective to build an eCommerce website is to get traffic & revenue from it.
And when we talk about getting relevant traffic to any website, SEO (search engine optimization) is probably one of the best mediums.
So, before you make your eCommerce website live, do ensure to perform some basic SEO activities, with the help of your website developer.
Here are some of the basic on-page SEO activities that you can do on your e-commerce store:
- Meta tags optimization (write title tag, description tag, and header tags according to your keywords).
- Inter-linking (linking inner pages with each other according to their relevancy and if they can be connected to each other through some of your main keywords, nothing like it).
- Loading speed (since the loading speed of a website has become one of the important factors to rank any website, you must ensure that your e-commerce store loads within 3-4 seconds).
- Robots.txt file (this file tells search engines about the important pages that they must crawl).
- XML Sitemap (to show search engines all the webpage links on your website).
- Content optimization (search engines are hungry for fresh content. The more you can feed them with it, the higher will be your chances to get into the top positions).
After following all the above 6 steps mentioned above, the final stage is to make your website live.
But don’t think your job is done. Instead, the actual job starts now. You need to analyze the users’ behavior on your website (using a web analytic tool like Google Analytics) and keep enhancing your website to get more sales & customers.
