Tips for Creating Your First Ecommerce Website

In 2016, everyone dreams about earning millions online, like it is the easiest thing in the world. What they don’t realize is that building success in a digital environment is like succeeding in any other line of work. It takes careful planning, flawless execution and of course some luck.

Like any other industry, e-commerce has its own rules and knowing them is the only way to exploit the system to your own advantage. With all of this in mind, here are few tips for creating your very first eCommerce website.

Thinking About the Basics

Sure, there are few technical issues that worry everyone. Usually these things are regarding hosting and setting up your website, but this is definitely not where you need to start with your site. Before you even begin thinking about making a website, you need to know just what you game plan will be. First, you choose an industry and a product you are going to deal with.

Then, you need to think about the prices you are going to offer. You can do some research in order to remain competitive, but what works for others doesn’t necessarily work for you and vice versa. Finally, you have things like local availability and shipping to think about.

On the other hand, not everything can be calculated on a sheet of paper. While you may enter this business only to make some money, you need to think about the long run as well. This means asking yourself the question of whether this is something you actually want to do or not.

Picking an industry that you have some personal interest in, may make your job much easier. When it comes to ambitions, nothing works quite like good old intrinsic motivation.

Technical Issues

As we promised, now is the time to proceed to the technical issues. This means finding the right web hosting service, choosing an appropriate domain name, but most importantly choosing the right platform. While most people go with some of the big names like Shopify or Magento there are some alternatives that are better suited to first timers, especially those operating on a tight budget.

By managing to find a free website builder you can set off to the right foot. Seeing how most of these builders work on a simple drag-and-drop principle, they are well suited to first timers while still giving a plethora of options to some of the most experienced users.

Payment Gateways

Next thing you should worry about are payment gateways. As a new business, you probably won’t be able to beat the prices of your more seasoned competitors, which means that you must put all your efforts into improving user experience. The first step on this path lies in providing your customers with their preferred payment gateways.

Imagine a situation where a person decides to buy a product from you only to find you that you don’t support their payment method. Which do you think is more likely outcome that they will change their gateway or that they will look for the same product somewhere else? It is exactly this that you need to avoid.

Safety Comes First

One of the most important things in e-commerce is that your clients can trust you. Of course, no one on the internet is 100 percent trustworthy, but there is a way to improve your image in the eyes of your clients. All you need to do is obtain EV SSL certificate that will vouch for your reliability.

Your safest choice would be to try and get an SSL certificate. This will serve as a guarantee that data is secure between servers, improve your Google ranking and reflect positively on your conversion rates.

Conclusion

As you can see, building your first ecommerce website is far from easy, but then again success never is. What you need to do is be systematic, plan everything out, deal with the technical issues surrounding your website organization and then work on getting the trust of your clients. For those who manage to achieve all of that only sky’s the limit.