ARE YOU BUILDING AN E-COMMERCE WEBSITE? 8 Steps to your Success! (PART – 1)

Posted on 21. Feb, 2012 by in eCommerce Solutions

Take a moment to go through these 8 Steps to improve your online sales!

For quite a long time, I have been receiving many enquiries for e-commerce website portals. The only thing common between them is everybody wants to sell something online and earn revenues like eBay, Amazon does… and obviously, they want to explore all the options to promote their business online successfully. So while I worked on various requirements with them, I thought to share all those basic things to be considered while launching e-commerce shopping portals or online stores.

Online store setup or e-commerce portal development is not only about the sales process or just a design part of it. It actually involves an in-depth planning phases including defining your audience, understanding your competitors, spreading your services in better manner, pushing it towards sales & marketing and then after launch continuing same level of efforts to evaluate your website, your sales, profit margins on a regular basis to keep everything on a smooth running track.

So, in my opinion, it’s not that easy task but needs a strategic planning to make it successful business venture within short period of time.

Based on my work experiences with various companies with online shopping portals, physical stores I tried to put together this action plan before starting a e-commerce/ shopping cart website development which has made a successful business for many companies till date.

  • Step #1: Choose your DOMAIN NAME
  • Step #2: Hosting Services Provider
  • Step #3: Open Source/ Off-the-Shelf Shopping Cart or your OWN CUSTOM Shopping Cart?
  • Step #4: Merchant Account and Payment Gateway
  • Step #5: Website Secure Certificates (SSL)
  • Step #6: Website Analytics
  • Step #7: Online Promotions
  • Step #8: POST Launch Review

Now, we’ll start drilling down into the more details on each of these step to unlock your way to building a successful shopping portal online.

Step #1: Choose your DOMAIN NAME

Domain name plays an important role when it comes to your online brand identity and visibility on the search engines.

Consider below criteria while choosing your domain name:

  • If the portal is about only your own brand. Choose domain name with your brand name to make it more visible online.
  • For multi-brand stores, we suggest to consider catchy keywords, which users can remember easily as well as which are easy to search online.
  • If you’re shipping to a limited geographic area, consider adding your region, geo area to the domain name. This will bring better results in search ranking. For ex: If you’re shipping & operating only for Miami City, XYZFashionStoreMiami.com bring better results for your geographic area compared to XYZFashionStore.com, which is more generic.

 

Step #2: Hosting Services Provider

This may not be a big deal of issue in initial phase but it becomes a big once your website drives huge traffic.

  • Identify your need for the start and chose between a shared hosting or dedicated server options.
  • Initially you can go with a shared hosting with a limited package. This will help you to save a recurring costs while you evaluate website performance. However, make sure the hosting company provides a dedicated server option as well in case you want to switch at later date. This helps to a smooth switchover without any downtime.
  • There are hundreds of companies offering almost peanut pricing for hosting services but be careful here. Instead of the low cost providers, go with someone who is more reliable and established. Also check whether the provider has round the clock customer service available. This is critical aspect of disaster management in case of something happens to the website and you need to handle it right there only.
  • Your hosting server should be reliable and fast with latest hardware configuration, providing ample bandwidth & disk quota for smooth functioning of the website portal.

 

Follow Next Steps here to know more about programming and setting up your online web store, setting up merchant account & payment gateway, setting up website analytics and online promotions, post launch reviews.

 

About the Author:

Santosh Kompalwar is working as Director of Techview Web Solutions Pvt Ltd and the Technology Solutions Experts for the various organizations. Santosh is Co-Founder/CTO of The Real Recruiter, the real estate industry’s complete recruiting technology platform. Santosh is also Co-Founder of CodiScan – A Mobile Marketing & Loyalty Program. He can be reached at +91-9665040106 or e-mail him at santosh@techview.biz. Visit his website at www.techview.biz, www.therealrecruiter.com and www.codiscan.com

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