Web Development and Search Engine Marketing Agency | Thousand Oaks CA

Setting up an E-commerce Website

Set-Up

There are 5 major items that you need to have to start selling online. These are a front-end design, web hosting, a merchant account, a payment gateway, and a shopping cart. A front-end design and web hosting are similar to setting up a non-ecommerce site but now much more careful consideration must be made to how you would like the user to interact with your site. Online shoppers show enormous loyalty to a well-designed, easy-to-use online store. Once a user has had a satifactory online experience, they will be unlikely to shop anywhere else for a similar product. A well-defined e-commerce website focusing on the first page all the way through the end of the order process will keep your users coming back.

Solid web hosting is vital for an online store. Any down time from a hosting provider means your money being wasted for every second that it is not up and live. Speed is also a factor as hoting companies placing your site along with 500 other sites on the same server can bring down performance for the user. Better to pay a bit more for hosting that guarantees speed and reliability. Don’t be cheap on web hosting as you will most likely get what you pay for.

A merchant account allows a business to accept credit cards, debit cards, gift cards and other forms of payment cards. Anyone wanting to receive credit card payment for goods or services must apply for a merchant acount. Many large bank branches offer this service as well as Merchant Service Providers (MSPs). Merchant accounts are not free and rates and fees vary from provider to provider. The health of your own credit also determines how much you will pay for, or even be able to get, a merchant account. Some fees are charged on a monthly basis but most are charged on a per sale percentage.

Once a merchant account is established, the next step is to get a payment gateway. Think of a payment gateway as a virtual point of sale terminal located in most retail shops. Typically, a payment gateway is a separate company from the merchant account. A customer submits an order, which is sent from their computer to the merchant’s web server. The merchant then forwards that information through the payment gateway which holds the information of the merchant account transaction to the merchant’s bank for authorization. At the end of the bank day, the money is transferred to the merchant’s specified account. There are a number of payment gateway providers including Versign, Authorize and AssureBuy.

Information such as credit card numbers sent electronically from the customer’s computer to the merchant’s webserver need to also be encrypted. This is usually done via SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. Seeing the lock on the top of the browser window when ordering a product online assures you that the page you are on is encrypted by SSL. SSL certificates are usually done through a yearly, automatically recurring fee. Thawte, Comodo and GeoTrust are the three main SSL certificate providers.

Tying a front-end design with a merchant account to process credit cards requires a shopping cart. There are a couple of options for a shopping cart - buy an off-the-shelf cart or build your own. Of course buying an off-the-shelf cart will be the lesser expensive option and unless you have very specific needs, is probably your best option. Rudy Interactive uses three different carts depending on the needs of the clients. These are X-Cart, osCommerce and Shopsite. X-Cart and osCommerce are considered open-source solutions as they are made with programming languages not owned by any one company. These have the benefit of being more fully customizable using a module system, meaning you buy the cart and add on modules to suit your needs. But they also mean that they require more work to fit those needs. Shopsite is an ASP language cart, which means that it is built using Microsoft’s ASP programming language. Shopsite comes with a multitude of options but chances are if you want something that Shopsite doesn’t already have, you cannot get it. Deciding which option is best for you is mandatory before you start building anything.

Those are the essentials of setting up an e-commerce shop. Now that you have the site built, it’s time to get customers to visit it and hopefully make your first sale.

Marketing and Research

Now that your site built, it’s time to start advertising. There are a number of options here that I won’t cover in detail as it is a separate and lengthy discussion, but you can divide advertising into 2 different umbrella groups - paid and organic. Paid advertising are things like sponsored results on Google and Yahoo or banner advertising on blogs or other websites. These are usually short-term gains in traffic for a fee. Organic refers to achieving top placement on Google, Yahoo and other search engine’s results pages through relevant content coming from a well-organized, well-established website. Achieving organic placement is an ongoing process that requires constant research and adjustments on your website. This research has to do with monitoring user behavior on your site, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and making adjustments to this process to increase the satisfactory user experience. It is a multi-tiered approach that looks at such things as keyword placement on your site, building backlinks with other sites, and many other options depending on the results you are looking for. Organic placement is what every online retailer should strive for as it is a long-term benefit and is key to a successful online shop.I hope this article has given you some insight about doing business online. Understanding what is involved and researching the various options available to you are vital to having a successful online business. Now go get that first sale!