Starting an eCommerce business is hard work. To be successful, you must constantly evaluate your site, your sales and your profit. Before you start building an eCommerce website, consider how you sell your products. Consider whether your products offer color choices, size choices, use a sliding price scale and how many items are included in a normal order.
Starting an e-Commerce business is hard work. To be successful, you must constantly evaluate your site, your sales and your profit. Before you start building an e-Commerce website, consider how you sell your products. Consider whether your products offer color choices, size choices, use a sliding price scale and how many items are included in a normal order.
Choose a domain name and hosting
Build an e-Commerce website Choose a domain with your important product keywords; especially if you plan to rely on online advertising such as banners or text links. If you need to build your brand, you need to find a unique name that people will remember after reading it in your online and offline marketing campaigns. For example, we have come up with a name and logo for Covako vacuum cleaner bags that are unique and recognizable. The name covako comes from two words, co from company and vako is aspirants and means vacuum. In other words, vacuum vacuum cleaner bags for companies.
Consider how words are spelled, often misspelled and healthy, carefully when making your choice. Say your potential domain name out loud and think about how someone who hears it can spell the words. Name friends and family if they ask you how to spell your new name; it can be a bad choice.
In the beginning you do not need a large hosting account or web server. Use a shared web hosting account where it is possible to expand web space and bandwidth. It is much easier to upgrade an existing account than to go to another host. Moving has the additional risk of possible downtime while your files are being moved and your domain name is reassigned to your new host.
External shopping cart or complete webshop?
If you plan to sell fewer than 10 products; consider using a regular website with a number of advanced links / forms for an external shopping cart application. While this is easier to set up, remember that people who leave your site and return later will return to an empty shopping cart, which can lead to lost sales.
For a larger and more dynamic product catalog, e-Commerce solutions with full functionality are the best choice. Magento Commerce, Zen Cart and osCommerce are some of the great open source projects that offer free or cheap programs to run a webshop. They are all very powerful and have many modules to build exactly what you need for your webshop. Thanks to their modular design, even non-programmers can easily implement additional functions.
Online payments
To make an online business successful, it is very important to offer the right payment methods. Think carefully about your options, because some options, such as bank transfer, are often very customer-friendly, but very time-consuming. We recommend using Mollie, through Mollie you only pay one fee per payment, while banks often apply (high) monthly rates in addition to a fee per transaction.
If your margins are high enough, you must offer credit card payments. PayPal is a good option; they even offer online credit card payments where the buyer does not need a PayPal account.
Once you establish a number of baselines and know your average number of monthly transactions, check the other online payment providers to see if they offer better rates. Don't forget to check which services the bank offers where you offer your business account.
Styling your e Commerce site
By using one of the free shopping cart applications, you must be able to invest in a professionally designed template. It is much easier to customize your online store if you choose a shopping cart template before you start customizing. The fastest and cheapest solution for finding a unique design for your webshop is to start with one of the many available pre-designed templates and make the necessary adjustments to make it your own.
If you have an existing webshop and you add one of the pre-created templates, you must add the modules again to keep all your current adjustments.
After the first year
You have to ask yourself, what did I learn in the past year? Where have I failed? Where did I look best?
Check your sales to determine if there are any hidden gems or leeches. Your number one or two best-selling items may cost you money instead of letting you earn money; while that item that you never really promote yields the highest return.
Check your shopping cart and payment options. Is there a better plan available for your sales volume? Do you pay too much per transaction? Are you losing sales because your payment option does not allow foreign sales?
Do you want to expand your product line? Investigate whether your current payment service can handle the changes. If you plan to expand to another country, you must examine the language and currency options.
Two final tips
Consider your future business plans whenever you consider making changes to your shopping cart application. Never change your application because you think it is a fun feature or because you like it. Everything you do must be about your customers and entice them to buy your products.
Create a test area in which you can test every change before you make changes to your live application. Sometimes a small change can cause the entire website to no longer work correctly - better to test offline and then to lose business by having a non-working site.
Project Covako vacuum cleaner bags
The last e-commerce project we have developed is the web shop for Covako vacuum cleaner bags. This webshop has been developed based on our high-tec MVC framework. This framework guarantees a super fast webshop, SEO technically in perfect order and less costs in developing and / or expanding the webshop with new functionalities.
For more information please contact us via info@sofco.nl