E-Commerce Design
Thinking of selling products/services on-line? Scratching your head because it seems difficult to select an e-store solution? No need to worry. The following points aim to help you in selecting your e-store solution.
Why should I open an online store?
Simply put, we are experiencing an Ecommerce Renaissance, where having an online presence is fundamental to operating any successful business. Online stores are accruing billions of dollars in revenue, and growing, making it foolish to ignore this fertile marketplace.
Ecommerce is the ability to sell products through an online store. In recent years, many small businesses have managed to double or even triple their revenue by making their products available on the Web. Additionally, an Ecommerce site is a less expensive alternative to owning an offline store because of staffing, storage and distribution costs, all with the added benefit of exposure to the millions of shoppers who surf the Web daily.
What's needed to operate an online store?
An integrated solution, there are several different components that are necessary to sell online, including:
- Web Design
- Web Hosting
- Shopping Cart
- Merchant Account
- Payment Gateway
First, you must choose an Ecommerce Web design package. From there, you can select a store creation and management tool, which is generally known as a shopping cart. Shopping carts make it possible for you to display your products to potential customers and allow them to purchase items for checkout.
A Merchant Account allows you to accept credit card payments online. It handles fraud checks on each transaction, as well as the transfer of funds from your customer's credit card to your bank account.
Lastly, you'll need a payment gateway, which often comes included with a merchant account.
How do I administer my store?
It's necessary to choose a hosting company that can accommodate your online store as well as your Web site. The hosting company should be able to provide a reliable, secure, easy and powerful environment within which to establish your store. A reliable host will be able to give you the connectivity and resources you need to get your online business created and available for the world to see.
Your Ecommerce host should be able to provide answers to the questions on this checklist to help you make an informed decision:
- Do you provide a web-based control panel which guides you through the host features?
- Does the web-based control panel provide web page editing tools? It is a must for those storeowners who do not have HTML knowledge. However, more technically savvy storeowners may think that it's useless.
- Can I incorporate my own HTML web-pages and CGI programs with the e-store? This feature adds flexibility for e-store design.
- Can I upload and download product data to and from a database? It's essential for storeowners to update and modify their records. Pay attention to how the e-store software tracks visitors. Some of them solely depend on the use of cookies but many people disable cookies in their browsers.
- Do you use active server pages? If yes, you should ensure that the e-store server is Windows NT. If it is Unix, you should check whether Chillisoft ASP is provided or not.
- Any value-added features offered by the host providers? E.g. message boards enable your getting customer feedback, autoresponders allow you to keep in touch with prospective customers, etc.
- After your customers place orders, can you automatically send a thank you note to them? Can they automatically receive an official invoice? Make sure they can. Otherwise, you may have an administration nightmare!
- How about security features? Is SSL or SET capability included? How are credit card details stored? On-line or off-line? Stored in an unsecured area of the server or in a secured server.
- How often does the host provider back up your e-store including all types of information? Daily backup is desired.
- When you want to update your e-store, can you update it on-line? It's more convenient. Otherwise, you need to update the e-store off-line and then upload it to the server.
- How about reporting features? Some host providers only allow basic analysis of server logs, for example the number of hits and referrer information. This is not sufficient. Ensure you can get user visit history analysis, where customers come from, etc.
- Does the host provider provide unlimited bandwidth features? The web space provided is enough or not? It may hinder your business growth if bandwidth and webspace are not enough. This may not affect you at the beginning but adversely affect you when your e-store grows.
You can treat the above points as a general guide and ask your potential host providers whether these features are present and fit your requirements.
Your DAG designed E-Commerce package will include the research and implementation of many of the above components required to create and deploy your e-store online presence.
Our clean and innovative style will have your company's look and feel shouting for attention.
