Building your First eCommerce Website: Everything You Need to Know

Selling your products on a website has a myriad of benefits. For one, it saves you from renting a physical store while giving you a wider reach. If you’re thinking about setting up an eCommerce business, you need to build your website and organize everything. Before you worry about selling your products, focus on your website first and consider the following tips to get the best result.

Choosing Products to Sell

For many eCommerce startups, the hardest thing to do is to decide what products to sell online. You need to determine which ones suit your goals and the online market. To find the best products to sell on your website, start by choosing a niche or industry. Consider the profit margin of industry and concentrate on local marketing to narrow down your choices.

Once you have decided which products to sell, organize them and set a price for each of them. Create detailed descriptions of your products and gather your product images. You can hire a professional photographer or shoot the products yourself. Don’t wait to do this after you have set up your website since it will slow down the entire preparation.

Choosing Domain Name and Website

Coming up with a good domain name is very important when building your eCommerce website. Your domain name can make a positive or negative lasting impression and a bad one can send your prospects away from your website. To choose the perfect domain name, choose something brandable instead of generic.  It has to be unique and outstanding so your visitors will easily remember it.

Don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. Think outside the box and create new, catchy words. You can even use domain name generators to help you create an extraordinary and interesting domain name. Most importantly, make it short and concise since lengthy domain names are difficult to type and too complicated.

Finding a Theme that Matches your Vision

Before you finally set up your website, choose a theme that fits your eCommerce vision. There are lots of responsive website design templates to choose from but it is best to use the one that suits your brand, your niche, and your business goals. Customizing your theme is also good but if you want to save some time and effort, just download a theme from website template sites like Themeforest instead of building your website from scratch.

Setting Up the Website

Now that you know your niche, products to sell, domain name and theme to use, you can finally set up your eCommerce website and choose trustworthy online marketplace. It is up to you if you want to hire a website developer but if you have a tight budget, you can either use website builders like Weebly and Wix or make good use of WordPress. If you don’t know how to code and you want to focus on content and strategy, website builders are perfect for you. On the one hand, WordPress is best if you want to achieve independence, scalability, backend control and advanced customizability.

Getting Productive with the Right Software

When building your eCommerce website, you should utilize various software and tools for different purposes such as web design and content management. There are lots of free and paid software available online but you need to pick them based on your needs, goals and desired outcome. You may also want to install plugins to improve your site’s functionality. By using the right software for your website, you can easily grow your visitors, gain prospects and turn them into customers.

Getting a Payment Gateway

To receive payments from your customers, you’ll need to get a payment gateway. Of course, you have to make sure all your eCommerce transactions are safe to keep your customers happy and secured. Some of the popular payment gateways are PayPal, Square, and Stripe. Most of these payment gateways are able to process payments in just a few seconds with three steps which are encryption, request, and fulfillment. Your payment gateway may also help you in calculating tax costs and screening orders.