Ecommerce Websites

According to Practical eCommerce there are over 500 different shopping carts available which offer your customers similar kinds of services.

You need to decide the most appropriate solution to suit your needs depending on what kind of industry you operate within and your point of difference.

Ecommerce merchants should be focused on usability, functionality, design and security, and be familiar with best practices in eCommerce.

The following are some of the desirable features you might seek in an eCommerce solution:

1. An intuitive web based administration control panel - you want an admin panel that is user friendly, allowing you to control every aspect of your online store. It is within the administration control panel that you want to have the ability to manage customer orders, product data including prices, product descriptions and photos, email newsletter subscribers, storefront look and feel, shipping rates and taxes. Order and category management and payment methods are other aspects of you website that you may control from the panel.

2. Bulk upload capability of categories, products and images

3. Shopping Cart Data Import/Export - Full import and export capabilities of product/user/order/language databases in CSV format. You may also want the ability to export to google base and Quickbooks. Having a flexible import/export module means you can get data in and out of your web store as a CSV file.

4. Custom Store Design: A visually appealing website helps to capture the attention of visitors and projects a professional image. By prominently displaying your logo, your designer your customers will come to associate your products with your brand. When engaging a designer to design a website, make sure you ascertain what the package you are being offered includes. Pay regard to the positioning of your logo, the ability to modify colour schemes to match your logo and the graphic design of your home page.

5. A system that doesn't mean you have to have programming knowledge to install and set up.

6. Product and category pages with category/product thumbnails and detailed images on product pages, making your page more SEO friendly

7. A fast one page checkout process as opposed to a multipage checkout - The entire checkout process should be completed on one screen to maximum sales. Less user clicks leads to less abandoned carts and greater sales. Offering fast track guest checkout permits your customers to complete purchases without having to go through the tortuous process of setting up a user account. You might also want to capture extra information by using custom checkout fields.

7. Suitable eCommerce Web Hosting - Bear in mind you are renting server space and the cost will depend on the disk space you occupy and bandwidth you consume. Therefore the time your customers take accessing your website should naturally factor into this. Most eCcommerce web hosting providers charge variable rates irrespective of how many products you have in your store, whilst some will give you a guarantee of unlimited hosting meaning no hidden data or bandwidth bills.

8. A search engine friendly shopping cart - Search engine optimisation must be a critical plank in your internet marketing strategy for your store. Therefore the software should contain a search engine friendly shopping cart. Most web visitors, in the vicinity of 85% find information via search engines, being perceived of as unbiased relevant information sources. Customers may be searching in order to buy your product or service. You need to distinguish between the hunters and the browsers. Most customers find online sellers through search engines, directly through a store's URL, search engine shopping channels, marketing email, internet ads, or comparison bots and comparison sites.

Remember that websites fall into two categories, static websites with all data stored within html pages and dynamic websites where the data is stored within a database. Shopping cart sites are dynamic because they rely on data such as information, prices and products. The problem with database driven websites is that they aren't often designed for search engines. The majority of shopping cart software isn't inherently designed to be SEO friendly. You still need to have a good search engine campaign to drive traffic to your website.

It is desirable to have a website with at least the potential to support an unlimited number of products/category and sub-category nesting, giving you the flexibility to assign products to multiple categories.

There are many other features of eCommerce solutions that are found in modern eCommerce based solutions. These will be canvassed in greater detail including analytics, a good inventory control system, shipping and taxes features amongst many others.

An eCommerce website solution is much more than a simple shopping cart.