The Web Hosting Blog of Host Color

To create a successful e-commerce website you should keep in mind several things starting with the web design. When thinking of how to design your pages you should stick to the best practices that use popular online stores. We suggest you to follow all general key points that make any e-commerce website successful. You’ll see some of them in this article.

Goods and services. How to sell them?

First of all, when starting an e-commerce website you should carefully consider the items you will sell. It is very different to sell goods or from selling services. Even the best product at best price may not turn an online shop into a successful one if there is not a good delivery system, something which depends more of how organized is your offline business.

It is very important to see an online shop the way consumers see a traditional one. This means to visualize how the customers get in, who they look in the products and buy any of them. Any good e-commerce website must be easy to navigate, the products must be categorized and customers must be able to compare them easily. Consider that any prospective customer could not see the product in real, so provid them with a good description.

A customer of a brick store chooses a product, pays and takes it. When it comes to online shopping the purchase is completely virtual and the owner of the website has to make sure that customers can make a several simple steps to get to the final step when they have to be told how and when they will get the product.

Another important think in the process of managing an e-commerce website is to find a good way to display promotions and new offers on the home page. Remember that a website that does not offers fresh  new content is in general less attractive and it is hard to make its visitors to come back.

The Customers. Why will buy from you?

To design and launch a fully functional and professionally looking website is just the first step. The next one is to build trust in your customers. Most online shoppers avoid e-stores that are anonymous. On your online store you should have pages like “About”, “Terms of service” and “Contacts”. They show that you are a serious business and builds credibility.

Security of payments and delivery.

The security is extremely important. It makes customers to buy and guarantees they will come back. When we say “security”, this means that shopping pages and the data your customers store and transfer through your website is secured.

To secure the payment information and the submission of customers’ orders any online store must have Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and dedicated IP address.

Lets make online shopping a pleasure!

You already have a good looking and well organized website, and the personal data of your customers is secured. What else do you need?

It is very important to make the process of ordering, paying and delivery fast and simple. This means to use a simple 1 or 2 step shopping cart application. Customers have to be allowed to add and remove products and/or services, to check their the items’ prices and the total price of all thing part of their shopping basket.

A nice and simple application that provides these features and even more is Zen Cart (Host Color provides it as a part of Shopping Cart Hosting and E-Commerce Hosting plans). It has great functionality and is very flexible and highly customizable. Zen Cart allows the integration of various payment methods and easy management of the product catalogue, new products, and promotional campaigns. Anyone can downloa Zen Cart from its website. Host Color’s customers has it in above web hosting plans.