What You Should Know Before Ordering an Ecommerce Website?
Do your homework before hiring an Ecommerce Website Designer.
Professional website design company based in Kolkata, India offers solutions for small business ecommerce website design and Shopping Cart solutions
Steps Involved in Building an Ecommerce Website:
1) Do the necessary market research - you first need to see if your product is in demand. It's no point spending time and money building your ecommerce web store only to find out no one is interested in your products.
Tips: Enter the most relevant keyword or keyword phrases that visitors would use to find a web site similar to that you are planning. Overture suggestion tool gives you an approximate idea on the searches conducted.
2) Prepare your product information: Use a word file to prepare a hierarchy structure or more appropriately an excel spreadsheet to prepare a horse shoe. Use the following columns
a) product categories and subcategories ie horse supplies-horse boots
b) product options ie sizes, colors
c) product ID number ie SK105
d) product description
e) product image
f) product price
g) shipping calculations
h) tax calculations
This helps your Web Designer to understand the Product Hierarchy and Product types. If you are in Europe or USA and plan to Outsource to an Indian Ecommerce Web Designer who is thousand miles away, you can easily explain him by following above process model.
3) Decide on the Shipping Agency that you will be using. UPS, USPS, Fedex, DHL, Canada Post re the common ones. All of them have Real Time Shipping Calculator which can be integrated to your site by your Ecommerce Website Designer provided you make a contract in advance. Real time integration has advantages and disadvantages. Your Designer or his Ecommerce Strategist can advise you more.
4) Which Payment gateway service do you integrate for accepting online payments. Paypal Pro is a standard in USA but the service is not available in other countries. To process Credit Cards you have to make a Merchant Account and then use a payment gateway like 2Checkout.com, WorldPay, Authorize.net, Psigate, iTransact, urpay.com and many more. Most of them have no annual charges. They charge a commission on each transaction. Some gateways like Cybersource charges an annual or monthly fee but offer subsidised commission. Decide which is the cheapest for your business model. You will get these information on their websites.
Open a PayPal account - The paypal payment system t is one of the easiest payment solutions to integrate with your shopping cart. You won't have to bother with a merchant account, payment gateway or shopping cart and signing up for a paypal account is free. Paypal charges you a small processing fee for each purchase. You can accept both paypal and credit card payments online. Customers from USA don't even have to open a Paypal account to purchase products with their credit card. However Paypal service is not available in all countries. To sign up or learn more, click on the banner below:
5) Register a Domain name. Try to use Network Solutions as the registrar. They are reliable and chances of any future hijacking are rare. Keep domain name short and try to make it meaningful to your business. A site selling travel packages will try to use a name travel-packages.com or .net than voertya.com. Try to get your keyword as the domain name or something close. choose a name that is easy to spell and remember. This makes it easier for the customer to return to your online store without looking it up.
6) Plan a site map for your site - Content that should come. Decide on how many information category pages you want on your site (product pages will be database driven and will be generated from same algorithm). Name the navigation links for the web pages according to the main product categories you will be using.
7) Sketch a rough layout of the home page on a piece of paper - (like a block diagram) to explain your imagination.
8) Select some ecommerce sites from similar business on the basis of search engine ranking and branding.
9) Plan a business minded Logo. Find some examples of logos relevant to your business.
10) Prepare an RFQ outlining your business definition, your products, targeted markets, age group and your goal. Outline features that you require and add ins that you might be taking.
Now you have reached an ideal position to look for an Indian Ecommerce Designer who can build a site as per your RFQ within a decent budget in excess of 2000 USD. Also ensure that he is having an SEO team who could later take up the promotion contract of the site and help you to achieve search engine ranking. The final goal of each and every ecommerce site is to have sales. The first step towards sales is "traffic". The cheapest and easiest option to get traffic is to enlist in a Search Engine Optimization plan that lists fixed cost to fixed deliverables.
Other methods of marketing include writing articles related to your site's material, advertising in ezines and pay per click advertising (instant traffic). Be sure to include offline advertising by including your web site address on all your stationary. The most important action you should do on a consistent basis to increase your presence in the search engines is to build your link popularity (number of links pointing to your site) and to do that you need to hire a professional search engine optimization company who have a fairly high success rates. Don't fall into a trap of money back guarantee which is a vague term used by small time SEO's who can at best do on page optimization. An Ecommerce SEO Program would be 1000 USD + and you will get results following the third month. Google results appear after 6 to 8 months.
Outsourcing to web designers india, results in a win-win relationship for both client and the designer. Both reap the benefit of costs and quality. Try us by filling an Online RFQ form.
