• Introduction
• How to Build eCommerce Website Development? Step By Step Process
• 5 Benefits of eCommerce Websites
• Key Components of a Successful Ecommerce Website
• Main Factors to Take Care in Ecommerce Website Development
• The 5 Key eCommerce Metrics You Should Be Tracking
• Creating a Privacy Policy for eCommerce Stores
• Future Trends in eCommerce
• Conclusion

Introduction

Popularly known as eCommerce in a short form, electronic commerce involves buying and selling products online. It redefined the way businesses function. Besides, it also allows businesses to make transactions more accessible.

With a myriad of activities right from marketplaces to retail stores and digital services,  eCommerce brings the possibility for businesses to increase their reach among customers. 

And for this, they don’t need to follow any geographical barrier. So, if you are seeking to develop an online store for your business, you should go through this eCommerce website development guide.

It lets businesses connect with their customers 24/7 and prompts them to purchase products and services based on their comfort and time. It doesn’t require businesses to have a physical store of products they sell.

In today’s digital era, eCommerce witnessed immense growth for various reasons, be it secure payment gateways, advancement in technology, or improved logistics. 

It brings vast growth opportunities to every business irrespective of their size and ensures their future growth. Before delving into how to develop eCommerce website, let’s understand some other related information.

How to Build eCommerce Website Development? Step By Step Process

Below mentioned complete guide for ecommerce website development is helpful to understand the basics while development.

1) Website name and domain is the priority

Choosing a website name also will be called as the URL name shouldn’t be taken lightly because it can help your audience relate to your business. It is recommended that you choose a name that is somehow related to your business, or a name that tells your audience what you sell just by reading the website name.After you have decided on the name of your website, the next is to purchase a domain name. You can go for domain registrar services like GoDaddy, Bluehost, Google Domains, etc. As you enter your business or website name on the registrar of your choice, the domain will let you know whether your desired name is available or not.Don’t be upset if you find that your domain name is not available, because your registrar will recommend alternate names. Like, you don’t want another recommendation, you can use other domain names like .net, .co, instead of .com.

2) Choose an eCommerce platform

Choosing an eCommerce platform decides a lot of aspects of your website because this is where your website lives and takes up space.

There are many eCommerce platforms where you can find various features that make it easier for building eCommerce websites, and some are free platforms. WordPress is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms used for free eCommerce websites.

You can also go for dedicated eCommerce or go for free platforms based on your convenience.

3) Dedicated eCommerce platforms

Want a full-fledged eCommerce ready within a short time? Your best bet is a dedicated eCommerce platform. The dedicated platforms provide expandability, along with fast development solutions. It offers various built-in functionality that speeds up the process of website development, like, secure payments, shipping labels, marketing and various other sales support.

Dedicated platforms charge somewhere around $30 per month.

4) Free eCommerce website platforms

Free ecommerce platforms bring eCommerce functionalities but with limitations. They let you sell products or services for free, there is a limit to how many products you can list. Free platforms also have only limited functionalities or features for building stores. Platforms like Ecwid offer up to 10 products for a free listing, but you can also use this platform for listing more items by upgrading to the paid version. Another platform called Free web store provides up to 20 free listings of products.

5) Websites with eCommerce functionalities

Wix and Weebly are two of the popular websites that offer various eCommerce functionalities. If you have a website on one of these sites for promoting your brand, and you are recently considering adding eCommerce functionalities, then you can simply switch to the eCommerce plan.

6) It’s now time for building the website

What will your eCommerce website consist of? As a website owner, you will have to work with a team or individuals to add value to your website. Some of the elements that your website needs are:

7) A logo or visuals on the website

Every business or a brand needs a logo – to which the audience can connect your business. You can either hire a designer for creating the logo for your brand, or use the same logo if you already have one. Other than that, you can also check out Canva for creating a free logo yourself.

8) Product photos, descriptions, and data

Product photos, descriptions and related data are some of the most important parts of developing an eCommerce website. One of the limitations of online shopping is that a potential buyer cannot hold the product in hand, feel the material or can tell its measurement by just seeing a random picture. For that, you must provide multiple pictures of the same product, accurate details and other related data to ensure that your potential buyer knows everything before they buy.

9) Your Story

Don’t write a random story, or keep it all generic in the About Us section. Or worse, don’t avoid keeping one. You have an eCommerce website and have a chance to tell a story to your audience, no matter how small or common it is.

10) Customer service pages

Customer service can be unique to different businesses, and as an eCommerce business owner, you need to provide services that keep your customer happy. Some of the common service that makes you a wholesome business are:

11) Mentioning shipping rates and timelines:

Potential customers like to evaluate both -the timings of when the product will reach them and the price that will be added to the MRP of the product for shipping. Stating the same will help with transparency.

12) Returns and exchanges:

It is common for customers to face situations where they want to return or exchange an order. Clearly state whether you offer returns or exchanges, and if yes, who will pay for those shipping charges.

13) Blog content

Blog contents are often considered indirect marketing and are quite effective albeit taking longer than direct marketing. You can update your website’s blog at a given frequency to increase the rank of your website on the SERPs. Blogs can be shared on your social media profiles also to get better visibility.

14) Set up payment, tax, shipping, and marketing tools

Setting up payment, tax, shipping, etc., is often made easier by eCommerce functionalities. Platforms like Shopify offer full-fledged eCommerce functionalities that have built-in tax calculations, payment processing, shipping labels, and even various advertising tools.

15) Payment processing and tax table setup

With plug-and-play integration along with popular payment services like Stripe or PayPal, all eCommerce website platforms are feature-rich in terms of payment processing. Some platforms have their own payment solution, like Shopify, which has Shopify Payments. All you have to do is connect your account to the payment processing and you will be connected.

16) Shipping setup

Integrating shipping software with your eCommerce platform makes it easier to speed up your order fulfilment. From shipping methods to shipping labels, this functionality makes everything easier.

17) Test before the launch of eCommerce website

As you reach the last stage of your eCommerce development, tests before launching are very important to all kinds of websites. Although not every website goes through the same kind of tests.

ecommerce companies allow test ordering features where you can test the whole process of ordering but doesn’t charge you in the payment process. This testing process will eventually help you find bugs if any, and assure you that your site is ready for launch.

After launching, it’s all about marketing your brand and listing your business in Google My Business to speed up the process of getting online sales. Many social media ads and Google Adwords ads can help your eCommerce website get the visibility it requires.

5 Benefits of eCommerce Websites

If you wish to sell your products online, having an eCommerce website is necessary and our guide helps you know how to open an eCommerce store. eCommerce facilitates your customers to buy products and make payments online smoothly. Apart from this, an eCommerce website makes you entitled to avail of several other advantages.

1) Remove Geographical Boundaries

Running a physical store lets you serve customers from limited areas. An eCommerce website removes geographical boundaries and helps you focus more on target customers even from across the world. Thus, it gives you an excellent chance to increase sales and earn vast revenue.

It prompts customers to purchase your products by using mobile apps. An eCommerce website helps sellers decrease friction points and makes it simple for buyers to purchase products from anywhere and anytime. eCommerce website lets customers buy products from the comfort of their homes and also encourages businesses to manage their business operations easily and conveniently.

2) Minimize Operational Cost

A physical store owner often needs to spend on various things, be it in-store staff, rent, inventory management, rental, electricity, etc. These expenses adversely impact the revenue of your business. An eCommerce website helps you get rid of all these expenses.

You can avail of the liberty to run your business even with a small team with a limited number of staff. You also get an option to use Dropshipping options to remove the necessity of physical products. Saving these costs helps you increase the revenue of your business.

3) Scalable and Flexible

Another advantage of an eCommerce website is its higher scalability, which enables businesses to flourish even without facing constraints related to any physical stores. An eCommerce store can cater to your changing business needs, Whether you are a startup or a highly established market player.

Be it adding the latest features, product expansions, or improved traffic, it accommodates multiple things. Apart from this, the flexibility of an eCommerce website helps businesses try their fate in the new market. Apart from this, it also lets them try some latest promotional strategies even without minimum investment and risk.

4) Easy to Access for Customers

As mentioned above, an eCommerce website is easily accessible to people based on their convenience. Whether they seek to browse, compare, or purchase products, they have the liberty to do everything even from the comfort of their home. They can avail of this kind of convenience 24/7 and can shop anytime and from any location based on their availability and leisure time.

Apart from this, eCommerce platforms facilitate customers to browse products with search and filters. It makes it easy for customers to find their desired products conveniently. Besides, a responsive design of an eCommerce website ensures its smooth accessibility on multiple devices.

5) Gather Data and Get Customer Insights

With an eCommerce website,  you can gather data related to your customers. The data helps you to gain a full of customer insights into their preferences, customer behavior, purchasing patterns, etc.

You can use this kind of information to develop the most effective marketing campaign. Besides, it also helps you personalize the shopping experience of customers, which also makes a significant impact in increasing sales and revenue.

Key Components of a Successful Ecommerce Website

Do you know 90% of eCommerce websites fail? And thus fails to match the expectations of business owners. You can, meanwhile, improve the chance of success of your eCommerce website by considering various crucial factors. Our eCommerce website development guide covers some of these factors.

1) Easy Navigation

Easy navigation is one of the vital factors that determine the success of any eCommerce website. If you are planning to start your own ecommerce website, you must be aware of its importance as well. It ensures customers can easily find products and their related details quickly. Easy navigation ensures your website has a good menu structure, categorized product pages, fully accessible search functionality, etc. Customers can easily spot the right product with the use of logical categories, labels, filters, etc.

2) Mobile Optimization

If you don’t optimize your eCommerce website for mobile, it will not serve its actual purpose. Responsive design of an eCommerce site can easily adapt to the orientations and screen sizes of your e-commerce store. It ensures a seamless experience. Apart from this, mobile optimization also ensures easy-to-tap buttons, quick loading speed, and more.

3) Intuitive Checkout

A lengthy checkout process often discourages customers from completing the entire process and buying products. It also causes a huge cart abandonment rate. As a result, it leads to a loss of sales. So, all you need to do is implement an intuitive checkout process. It should include multiple features such as progress indicators, guest checkout options, save cart items for the future, etc.

4) Customer Support

Expeditious customer support contributes a lot to making your eCommerce store stand apart from the competition. Make sure your online store provides various options for customer support, including email, live chat, phone, etc. You should also mention an FAQ section to help customers find answers to some of their common queries. It prevents them from getting in touch with your staff quite often.

5) Shipping and Return Information

It’s vital to make a transparent process for shipping and return policies to create trust among customers. All you need to do is display the shipping cost exactly, available options, and delivery times. Apart from this, you should also provide clear details about your return policy, including the entire return procedure. It boosts the confidence of your customers and encourages them to purchase your products.

6) Secure Payment Gateways

Security is something that excels in your brand as a reliable brand thus increasing trust among your customers. You should never leave any stone unturned to make your eCommerce store secure. Using a secure payment gateway reflects that payment-related information regarding customers is fully protected.

So, you should always use a secured and reputed payment gateway including Stripe, PayPal, Square, etc. to build trust among customers.

7) Inventory management

Effective inventory management is quite necessary for making your eCommerce successful. It’s vital to maintain the accuracy related to the product availability information. It automates the entire process of product restocking, updates the availability of products and displays them accordingly in real-time.

8) Calls to action

A bold and strong call to action encourages customers to take quick action and buy their favorite products. All you need to do is to use the right call to action at the right place. Make sure the CTAs you place are visually appealing and placed with a proper strategy throughout your website. It guides customers throughout their shopping journey.

Main Factors to Take Care in Ecommerce Website Development

An eCommerce website development is a process that includes multiple steps. Our quick guide of eCommerce website development includes all crucial steps.

1) Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform

Lets compare some of the renowned eCommerce platforms and select the best one based on your needs.

2) Factors Influencing Platform Choice

Selecting a perfect eCommerce platform is something business owners often get puzzled with. Our eCommerce website development guide includes certain key factors that you can consider while selecting the right platform to develop your online store.

1) Business Goals

As one of the crucial things, business goals are something you need to take into account while choosing the perfect eCommerce platform for your business. Your selected platform should support your business objective. Whether you have long-term or short-term objectives, make sure your business supports both.

2) Scalability

Everyone seeks to expand their business horizon in the coming times. So, make sure your selected eCommerce development platform allows you to do the same. The platform should be capable of accommodating increased traffic, transactions, additional product listings, etc.

3) User Experience

User experience has a pivotal role in making eCommerce business successful. Always select a user-friendly eCommerce platform that should be capable of offering an intuitive shopping experience to customers and thus can make a significant impact on your conversion rate. Your selected platform includes all those features to improve customer journey, including quick loading time, mobile users, easy navigation, etc.

4) Search Engine Optimization

Your online store should have impeccable visibility in search engines to gain more potential customers to increase product sales. Your selected platform should be able to support SEO and provide advanced marketing tools to help you promote your products most effectively.

5) Security

A robust security of your eCommerce website is necessary to prevent hackers. And you can’t make your online store unless you choose a secure platform, which ensures great protection for both your business and customers.

6) Budget

Budget is another crucial factor that you should never forget to consider while selecting the eCommerce platform. You can understand some platforms are free and open-source whereas others are available with a license fee. Of course, budget is crucial but you should never make a selection solely on your budget.

7) Support and Documentary

Adequate support is something that remains of great importance be it for resolving any issue, optimizing, or updating the store. You should always look for the level of support those platforms offer. Regular software updates are crucial.

Design Your E-commerce Site for More Conversions

The design of any website is crucial to increase its conversion rate and an eCommerce website is not an exception. Our eCommerce website design complete guide suggests you keep in mind the following points while designing your online store to boost its conversion rate.

1) User-Centric

User-centric design contributes a lot when it comes to increasing the conversion rate of your website. Make sure you have a website that is easy to navigate and has an intuitive design. It should have a clean layout, search functionality, a user-friendly menu, etc. These are essential to make the user journey amazing.

2) Easy Checkout

A complex checkout adversely impacts the conversion rate of your website. To tackle it, your checkout should ensure a smooth buying journey for customers. Guest checkout is the right option that lets people shop even without account creation. You can also show a progress bar to let your customers know how much journey they have completed and also what to complete.

3) Bold CTAs

As mentioned, CTAs increase the conversion rate of an eCommerce website. Therefore, make sure your design has proper and bold CTAs. Your CTAs should be able to encourage your customers to take action. You need to implement robust strategies when it comes to CTA placement.

4) Quality Descriptions and Images

Your website should be visually enticing, which is much necessary to increase its conversion rate. You should use high-quality images to showcase your products in a better way and also from different angles. You can also include various options including Zoom-in and Zoom-out and videos if possible.

5) Use Social Proof

As already mentioned above, building trust is essential to ensure the success rate of any eCommerce website by increasing the conversion rate. You can use customer reviews, social badges, guarantees, etc. to make your website trustworthy. You should ensure proper visibility of these elements. These should be easily accessible to customers.

6) A/B Testing

A/B testing is pivotal to find out ranges of design elements like buttons, product elements, colors, and more. You should go through the user’s feedback regularly. It provides you a chance to find out those areas that should be improved and thus helps you make decisions on the basis of data.

eCommerce SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimization (SEO) is quite necessary to magnify the visibility of your website in search engines. It helps you increase organic traffic to your website and thus boost sales and ROI. Let’s explore some of the practices you can implement to get the best outcomes.

1) A Proper Keyword Research and Optimization Strategy

You should first chalk out a proper keyword research strategy to find the right keywords for your eCommerce website. You should find out phrases your customers use while purchasing products related to yours. Once you find the right keywords, you can implement these everywhere be it descriptions, titles, meta tags, etc. Using long-tail keywords is always the right choice.

2) Write Eye Catchy Product Descriptions

You need to always write superior quality, informative, and user-engaging product descriptions. These descriptions are helpful for customers to make an informed decision. It also helps in ranking your online store in search engines. It’s advisable to avoid using plagiarized content.

3) Speed Optimization

Your website loads need to load without taking too much time to improve user experience. It’s vital to enhance search engine optimization. Slow page loading causes a higher bounce rate and thus impacts adversely on search engine rankings. You can also boost your website speed by minimizing unnecessary scripts, using content delivery networks (CDN), and images of websites.

4) Responsive Design

Google already made it clear it will prioritize a mobile-friendly design of an eCommerce website when it comes to improving search engine ranking. Therefore, you should always ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile to enhance SEO.

5) Use Schema Markup

Schema markup search has its actual purpose of providing required details to search engines about the products you sell to your customers. It improves product listings in search results, which makes it more informative and appealing to customers.

6) Use Reviews and Ratings

Reviews and ratings provide search engines with fresh and the most valuable content, apart from letting potential customers know about the experience of those who already purchased the same. It also helps in building more trust and reliability.

The 5 Key eCommerce Metrics You Should Be Tracking

The success of any eCommerce business depends on your ability to utilize real-time data and chalk out your business strategies accordingly. For this, you need to keep an eye on some important metrics which are as follows.

1) Cart Abandonment Rate

The cart abandonment rate reflects the number of users who don’t complete the entire process of purchase even after adding products to the shopping cart. You need to determine why users fail to complete the checkout process. It helps you build an effective strategy to minimize cart abandon rate, including simplifying the checkout process, retargeting campaigns, incentives, and more.

2) Conversion Rate

With conversion rate metrics, you can gather information regarding the number of users who take the final action to buy products. When it comes to a higher conversion rate, it reflects your website and product pages are effective and thus convincing visitors to purchase. Analyzing these metrics helps you find out some key areas to improve.

3) Customer Retention Rate

Your business strategy should also focus on retaining past customers. A customer retention rate indicates the number of customers who contribute to purchasing products over time.

If you have a higher customer retention rate for your business, it reflects your loyal customer base. You can adopt strategies like exceptional customer service, personalized marketing, etc. to improve customer retention.

4) Average Order Value

It signifies the average amount customers spend on every order. Increasing AOV can certainly have a great impact on the revenue you earn. You can boost your average order value through upselling and cross-selling related products, using loyalty programs, or providing quantity discounts.

5) Cost of Customer Acquisition

When it comes to customer acquisition, it determines the overall money you spend on acquiring a new customer for your business. By using this metric, you can easily determine the overall efficiency of your marketing efforts and also the overall budget you spend on it.

Creating a Privacy Policy for eCommerce Stores

Creating a privacy policy is necessary for your online store. It safeguards the personal details of your customers and also creates trust and compliance with legal regulations.

Let’s go through some steps to create a privacy policy for your eCommerce website.

• You can mention clearly what kind of personal details you collect from customers
• Mention what’s your purpose of collecting data
• Let your customers know about your strategies to protect their personal information
• Make it clear to your customers whether you share data with 3rd party
• Be clear about your cookie policy
• Mention customers’ rights, including corrections, access, and deletion of data

Privacy policy is vital for various reasons, which are as follows.

1) Adhere Legal Compliance

One of the primary reasons for having a privacy policy for your eCommerce store is to adhere to the rules and regulations of data protection.

2) Transparency

A privacy policy reflects your effort to maintain transparency in data-handling practices

3) Create Trust

If you handle your customers’ data responsibly, it builds trust among your customers.

4) Minimize Risk

Another advantage of privacy policy is it minimizes the risk of legal consequences and penalties caused by data mishandling.

5) Boost Customer’s Confidence

A well-defined privacy policy is also helpful in increasing trust and confidence among your customers.

6) Enhance Brand Reputation

A privacy policy is a reflection of your commitment to customers to ensure the safety of their personal information and thus improves your reputation.

Future Trends in eCommerce

eCommerce is set to witness many more trends in the future as an ever-evolving industry. Some of the trends that our comprehensive guide for ecommerce website development includes are as follows.

1) Voice Commerce

The emergence of Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa brought voice assistants as the most popular thing, which have nowadays become the most common things in our lives. And it prompts eCommerce businesses to adopt this.

They optimize their online store for voice search to let customers explore fun with voice-based shopping. It enables customers to use their voice commands only to buy products.

2) Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) has made a great impact on the way people shop online. With the technology, shoppers can avail of the liberty to try clothing virtually and can decide whether it’s the best fit for them or not.

Apart from the clothes, shoppers can also place furniture items in their homes virtually or also can test various makeup products. So, it improves the online shopping experience of customers by letting them experience a more interactive and immersive feel.

3) Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence increased the popularity of personalized shopping experiences as an emerging trend. Machine Learning (ML) has the immense capability to analyze data based on customers’ purchasing history. It recommends customers to buy the best products accordingly. It boosts both customer loyalty and conversion rate.

4) Ethical Shopping

Customers nowadays are also concerned about the social and environmental impact when shopping. They expect eCommerce business owners to offer sustainable products with the perfect package that should not harm the ecosystem in any way. Those service providers focus on this to experience a more competitive edge.

5) Mobile Shopping

As we already mentioned, the growing number of Smartphone users brought the trend of mobile shopping into the limelight. It prompts many eCommerce businesses to concentrate on mobile optimization and also develop user-friendly applications that redefine the shopping process with features like easy payment options and one-click purchases.

Conclusion

You are supposed to now have crucial information regarding how an eCommerce store is developed, after going through the above eCommerce website development complete guide. The guide envisages complete details of various steps to plan for developing an eCommerce website. To create your online store, you need to get in touch with a trusted service provider.