If you want to start an online business then you must be familiar with online shopping carts and ecommerce websites. To accept credit cards online you must build an ecommerce website which will accept credit card and debit card transactions. To build an ecommerce website you should have basic html and website creation experience. The following are some guidelines that may help you to effectively build an ecommerce website.
Important aspects of effective ecommerce web site design:
Layout and Visual Design:
The Layout and visual design of your website should be very attractive. If you want to build a website that look different from the competition then your website must be visually pleasing because it will be more likely to draw customers. There are a lot of websites where you can go to get ideas about what is visual pleasing and encourages customers to stay and purchase something.
Ecommerce Security:
Security is the most important thing you should keep in mind while designing an ecommerce website. You need to make sure that people know that they can input their most sensitive information safely and securely into your website. You should buy an SSL Certification which is a secure way for people to communicate with your web site. You need to add a clearly visible logo of SSL certification to your website. You need to contact your website host for SSL Certification.
Payment Processer:
While building an ecommerce website for online sales, you will need to add a payment processor to handle credit and debit card transactions on your ecommerce website. You should accept various credit cards and debit cards like Visa, MasterCard, Visa Electron, Switch, Solo, Discover, Maestro, Diners, JCB and other online payment options like PayPal. You should arrange this before launching your website so you can do business immediately after your website is launched.
Software Application:
You should purchase software applications for your ecommerce website design project which will help you before and after your ecommerce website is launched. These software applications help you if you want to track your orders, monitor your ecommerce database, track your visitors, see what visitors are doing on your website, send email notifications and manage users etc.
Reduce size of your webpage:
You can use XHTML and CSS based design which reduces the size of the codes of your web page. Normally people don’t wait if the webpage takes more than 3-4 seconds to load. If the code size of your webpage is reduced then obviously your page size will be decreased and your webpage will loaded very quickly and fast.
W3C valid coding:
After purchasing a domain you should validate your webpage with w3c validator tool. This will help your website to get top search positions and increase your website traffic through Google. Most top ecommerce websites are also built using w3c coding.
Product and page view:
Your website product pages should be very easy to find from any page of your website for both visitors and search engines. Descriptions of your products and categories should be unique, short and simple.
Automatic Meta Tags Change:
Every product and category page should have its own descriptive page. You product pages should have different titles and descriptions because optimized title and descriptions are strongly needed for search engine optimization of your ecommerce website.
Search Engine Friendly URL:
Ecommerce website have dynamic URLS like:
URL/index.php?crn=513&rn=3905&action=show_detail
Which is a valid URL but not a search engine friendly URL. Search engine friendly URLs help your website to get good rankings on search engines. You need to enable mod-rewrite (modification on apache server) which helps you to rewrite the URLs of your ecommerce website. You can use URLs like:
URL/mp3players/philips-2gb-mp3players.html
instead of
URL/index.php?crn=513&rn=3905&action=show_detail
Website Analytics and Statistics:
you should always analyze and monitor your web traffic. There are a lot of free website analytics and statistics tool available on the web. Web analytics and statistics show you the products that sell best, and you can see details of visitors of your websites by location, which will help you determine areas where you can increase your sales.
Flawless order process without registration:
Registration should be made an optional choice because in an ecommerce website so people have the choice of registering. This will increase your sales.
Product Search Facilities:
Product search facilities are the most important part of an ecommerce website. If you are offering a lot of products then it will be very difficult to find a specific product through manual search. You need to provide product search facilities which help visitors to find their required product easily on your website.
Delivery Details:
You should always mention delivery details. Make a page for delivery details which contain all the details of the products and the total amount (with details of shipping or handling cost) they are paying for their product and address details of the customer. Also provide email id and toll free phone numbers for your customers.
Ecommerce Web Site Design Service Providers:
If you want to build an ecommerce website quickly, but are not interested in doing it yourself then you can hire a professional ecommerce website design service provider. A professional ecommerce website design service provider can quickly build and test your website with all the features that an ecommerce website design needs.