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
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.
| Platforms | Easy to Use | Customization | Scalability | Hosting | Cost | SEO | Security |
| Shopify | Easy to use | Limited to Shopify apps and themes | Small and mid-sized business | Offers hosting for stores | Monthly subscription with transaction fees | Highly secured | Availability of SEO plugins and features |
| Magento | Need technical expertise to use | Fully customizable and good for large and complex stores | Good for large organizations for its scalability | Needs a separate hosting for your website | Higher cost for hosting and development | Highly secured | Good SEO capabilities |
| WooComm-erce | Need technical expertise to create and customize | Fully customizable with different themes and plugins | Needs a separate hosting for an eCommerce store | Free with paid hosting, themes, extensions | Needs a separate hosting for an eCommerce store | Highly secured | Powerful SEO features |
| Hubspot | User friendly | Limited customization compared to other platforms | Scalable for both small and mid-sized businesses | Needs a separate hosting for an online store | Higher cost for hosting and development | Highly secure | The latest SEO features are available |
2. Choose an eCommerce platform
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
5. Websites with eCommerce functionalities
6. It’s now time for building the website
7. A logo or visuals on the website
8. Product photos, descriptions, and data
9. Your Story
10. Customer service pages
11. Mentioning shipping rates and timelines
12. Returns and exchanges
13. Blog content
14. Set up payment, tax, shipping, and marketing tools
15. Payment processing and tax table setup
| Payment Gateway | Pricing | Quality | Integration |
| Stripe | 2.9% per transaction +$0.30 for online transaction | Developer-friendly API, good support, and documentation | Offers a range of APIs and plugins |
| Razorpay | 2% per transaction +0.25 transaction fee | Quality services for India-based businesses | Integration for multiple eCommerce platforms |
| Instamojo | 5% + 3 transaction fee | Lack of quality and support compared to other platforms | Simple API for developers |
| PayPal | Varies by regions | Global payment processor with a strong reputation | Wide range of integration and plugins for different platforms |
| Authorize.Net | $ 25 monthly gateway + Per transaction 2.9% + 30¢ | Stable and secure and good for businesses with complex payment needs. | Offers various APIs, plugins, SDKs, etc., and ensures smooth integration with multiple platforms |
| Square | 2.9% + 30¢ | Good for small businesses | N/A |
16. Shipping setup
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
1. Remove Geographical Boundaries
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
2. Mobile Optimization
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
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
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
1. Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform
2. Factors Influencing Platform Choice
1. Business Goals
2. Scalability
3. User Experience
4. Search Engine Optimization
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
1. User-Centric
2. Easy Checkout
3. Bold CTAs
4. Quality Descriptions and Images
5. Use Social Proof
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
2. Write Eye Catchy Product Descriptions
3. Speed Optimization
4. Responsive Design
5. Use Schema Markup
6. Use Reviews and Ratings
The 5 Key eCommerce Metrics You Should Be Tracking
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
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
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
2. Transparency
3. Create Trust
4. Minimize Risk
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
Future Trends in eCommerce
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
5. Mobile Shopping
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.
