5 Steps to Building an eCommerce Website

Starting an e-commerce business is hard work. To be successful, you must continually evaluate your site, your sales, and your profits.

Before you begin setting up your online shop, you need to consider how you sell your products. Think about if your products offer color choices, size choices, use a sliding price scale, and how many items will be included in a typical order.

Choosing a domain name and hosting

Choose a domain with your important product keywords; particularly if you plan on mostly relying on online advertising like banners or text links. If you need to build your brand, you should find a unique name that people will remember after they read it on your online and offline marketing campaigns.

Consider how words are spelled, frequently misspelled, and sound, carefully when making your choice. Say your potential domain name out loud and think about how someone hearing it may spell the words. Mention the name to friends and family, if they ask how to spell your new name; it may be a poor choice.

In the beginning, you won't need a big hosting account or web server. Use a shared web hosting account where it's possible to expand web space and bandwidth. It's much easier to upgrade an existing account then moving to another host. Moving has the added risk of possible downtime while your files are moved and your domain name is reassigned to your new host.

External shopping cart or complete web shop?

If you plan on selling less than 10 products; consider using a regular website with some advanced link/form to an external shopping cart application. While this is easier to set up, remember that people who leave your site and return later will be returning to an empty shopping cart which can lead to lost sales.

For a larger and more dynamic product catalog, a full-featured web shop is your best choice. Zen- Cart, osCommerce, and CRE Loaded are some of the great open source projects that provide free or low cost programs to run a web shop. All of them are very powerful and have many modules to build exactly what you need for your web shop. Their modular design allows even non- programmers to easily implement additional features.

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