An eCommerce website is the new normal and new shopping store for every customer these days. Every 3rd internet user is the buyer of eCommerce stores from the country where 95% of the population use the internet. If you belong to small, medium, or big businesses and sell tangible products you should have a strong online presence.
As per the latest survey: 43% of shoppers use the internet and use multiple social platforms and search engines to research products, verify their originality and quality before buying, and it is also expected that e-commerce revenue will reach $476 billion in the US by 2024.
50% of the customers have shifted to the online market. Be it Retailers or Wholesalers both will lose their current market value, customers, and revenue. Taking store where customers are is the only solution in the time of internet where eCommerce store development can help in making this possible.
Starting an eCommerce website allows you to sell either one product and also as much as you want, empowers you to control all aspects of your customer’s experience, branding shipping, and customer service. If you hold the technical expertise then you can build a successful eCommerce website and if you don’t then you can hire an eCommerce developer who has experience in building and deploying result-oriented eCommerce stores. However, knowing about the complete process of eCommerce website development can help you in making a result-oriented decision.
“Our experienced eCommerce developers have successfully developed and deployed 500+ successful eCommerce websites and applications that are leading the market and making healthy earnings.
Below are the points that we and our eCommerce website owner followed to successfully develop, launch and make it profitable. These points can be followed by any person who wants to start a new eCommerce store from scratch.
Ecommerce selling statistics
With an expected global population of 7.87 billion people, it is estimated that there will be 2.14 billion global online buyers in 2021.
The number one reason people chose to shop online is free delivery. And other reasons that encourage buyers to buy online are:
- Customers can use coupons and apply discount (41% of consumers receive the benefit)
- 35% of consumers buy after reading other customers reviews
- 33% steps forward to buy only when they are assured with the easy return policy
- 30% of the total consumers consider security and easy checkout process to buy online
More than 1/3rd of American small businesses do not have a website. Now, even with limited capital you can set up an online store and sell products worldwide. It is estimated that 95% of purchases will be made online by 2040.
It would be fun to know that 43% of online shoppers have purchased while in a bed, 23% from the office, and 20% from the bathroom/restroom or in a car.
Unfortunately, the US market is not the largest market for eCommerce. It stands 2nd in the global eCommerce market list with $340 billion worth. The top 10 largest e-commerce market in the world are:
- China: $672 billion
- USA: $340 billion
- United Kingdom: $99 billion
- Japan: $79 billion
- Germany: $73 billion
- France: $43 billion
- Canada: $30 billion
- Russia: $20 billion
- Brazil: $19 billion
Mobile eCommerce accounts for 45% of US eCommerce sales and the annual eCommerce sales are projected to grow from $284 billion in 2020 to $488 billion in 2024. Mobile-friendly websites convert more sales than just desktop-friendly eCommerce websites.
Also Read: – How eCommerce mobile app development is beneficial for small business?
Make sure your website is compatible across the screens with speedy page loading.
Points to bear in mind when developing an Ecommerce store
1) Find a product to sell
The first step is always the toughest step but the most needed one. When you are planning to build an eCommerce website from scratch you should first decide which product you will be selling online on your store to your customers. If you have an offline store already and want to just shift the same store to the online market then you don’t have to perform this step. This step is challenging but very important for those who are looking for a bright future in the eCommerce sector.
2) Evaluate your idea
Once you finalize the product that you will sell online to your customers, you should also be sure if it will be sold and loved by the customers. Evaluate if there is a demand for the product you’re selected to sell. A successful eCommerce website owner always performs this action and you should do too to be sure about the potential of the product in the market.
3) Research and analyses your competition
Be it taste or feelings, in this fast world, everything is changing at a quick pace. You have decided the product to sell, evaluated your idea but the 3rd step you should perform is researching and analyzing your competitors. What you should look for?
- Is there anyone else selling the same product online that you are going to sell?
- How are they selling?
- What marketing method are they using to sell their product?
- How much are they making and what amount of customers follow them?
- What type of quality are they selling?
And much more questions can be asked and should be asked to conduct a competitive analysis. To lead the market you should either sell a unique product or choose a unique way of selling to have maximum visitors on your website.
4) Choose the appropriate business model
Identifying your target market and understanding what your ecommerce business model will be is one of the necessary part of research and analysis and writing a business plan to get huge ROI as compare to normal.
There are usually 5 types of business models you should research, study and decide how you would like to be known among the customers, in the market and what would be the best way to reach them before investing.
- B2C ecommerce: A market where you can reach and sell your products to end customers directly.
- B2B ecommerce: Do you have huge manufacturing of the product you are willing to sell? Would you like to sell them at once to wholesalers, retailers, and business buyers? Here you can sell a huge amount of your production at once and generate quick cash flow.
- Selling on Online Marketplace: If you own a product and want to sell online using other online selling platform than you can join Amazon, eBay, Etsy and sell your products directly to end-user without investing much on making eCommerce website.
- Drop Shipping: You can take orders as much as you want and simply deliver them on time without the headache of storing and managing inventory. You can pass the order to a 3rd party providing dropshipping services and they will deliver the product on behalf of you.
- DTC: Direct To Consumer business model removes the middlemen and their commission (multi-brand retailers and wholesalers) to deliver the product at an affordable rate within the time frame.
5) Write a business plan
A business plan plays a vital role in determining:
- What to be done?
- How to be done?
- What steps should be taken to succeed in the future?
- What method should be used to reach maximum customers?
Writing a business plan is the best time after you are sure of the above 3 steps. A business plan is where you mention a roadmap that will help you combine your thoughts and vision and bring life to your dream.
6) Purchase a domain name
A domain name is important for everyone out there who is planning to start an eCommerce website or already has offline business and looking to shift to online selling. A domain name is going to be your website name, the name of your online store. The right domain name can create a lasting brand image as per the marketing standpoint.
If you already have a domain name then there is no need to buy a domain. If you don’t have one you can simply visit reputed domain selling website stores like GoDaddy, NameCheap, and others that you know.
When buying a domain there are 10 key points you should take care of to gain the benefit in long run. The key points are as follows:
- Check the competition if they don’t have the same name
- Avoid creative spelling and make it easy to type and remember
- Shorter is better
- Stick with .com
- Use keywords in your domain name search
- Keep it unique and brandable
- Avoid hyphens in domain name
- Avoid doubled letters
- Leave room to expand
- Avoid generic names
7) Find a developer
This is crucial, challenging, and the most important component in launching your website. Whether you want to make your website from scratch, upgrade the existing one or update it from the legacy to the latest version experience eCommerce developer can make all the mentioned process simpler as this is what they do to earn their bread and butter, have been doing since year which makes them this work a cup of tea.
They can help you in setting up the store fully which will make you sell your products online soon before the expected date. Not every eCommerce website development company has a talented and experienced developer that can deliver you the expected result. Thus when you plan to make your eCommerce website and get it live soon, you should do your vetting.
- Check reviews of the company you are selecting.
- Get references from your experts or other ecommerce website owners who already have got built their website
- Take an interview to understand what level of experience and expertise they have
- Take a important point as a key consideration of communication and on time reporting
- Check about their previous work
- Make sure developer is understanding you and your vision
- Last but not the least check if they can create what you want under your budget.
8) Register your business and get all your paperwork
You cannot sell until you are legally authorized, registered, and licensed. To complete this legal process you should contact a reputed and knowledgeable Lawyer or Attorney that can guide you with all legal issue and paper works needed and can help you in registering your business and enabling you as a legal online seller of tangible goods.
9) Select best ecommerce website development platform
An eCommerce development platform is a software that allows businesses to manage and sell their products online with the flexibility of adding multiple features and products anytime.
Features you will get – How to select best ecommerce platforms – Complete ecommerce guide
There are a bunch of eCommerce website development platform from which we recommend
- Shopify
- Magento
- BigCommerce
- Nopcommerce
These four are the most popular eCommerce development platform. Most of the developers are aware of these platforms and have sound expertise in them that makes them easy to integrate 3rd party tools if needed, integrate payment gateways, plugins, ERP, CRM, etc.
It is possible that on google you will find 10+ eCommerce development platforms and you will be confused about which one to go with if you are non-techy. But don’t worry you can contact an eCommerce development solutions provider who can help you in assisting from scratch to end by listening to your business needs, vision, and expectation.
Contacting the expert will be a worthwhile decision that will save you time, energy, and money.
10) Buy a premium web hosting service
An eCommerce website is all about engaging maximum traffic, converting maximum visitors into customers, and making their selections and cart into sell. This all is only possible when the website is hosting on a strong and spacious hosting server that is capable enough of managing heavy traffic when website experience.
- Having a premium web hosting service ensures you won’t have your website down due to heavy traffic
- Buying a premium web hosting service also ensures the fast loading speed of your website which the secret component of every eCommerce website success.
As per the research: 75% of the customers abandon the site if a website takes more than 3 sec to load, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversion. Improve conversion rate of Magento eCommerce Store
Deciding on buying premium hosting can make you the leader of your industry and also you can get unexpected benefits in the season sale.
11) Buy readymade theme
Find a theme that matched your website vision that can allure your customer, satisfy them, and engage them. There are 30,000+ ready-made themes and templates available in the market that can be used as it is if it is the same as you want for your eCommerce website.
If you love the theme but need some changes, you can customize it as per your business niche and needs. If you are not aware of how to customize that you can reach any eCommerce development company that has expert designers to help you in making your site look good, stunning, and user-friendly interface.
When deciding the theme do follow the below-mentioned points for the success of your store:
- Avoid clutter. As per the research, simple designs have higher conversion
- Simplify your menus
- Add a search bar
- Smooth, clear and concise customer navigation
- Communicative homepage
12) Add your products
When the developer will build a site there will be a page where you will be allowed to upload all your product images, descriptions, categories, and other information if you want.
Product pages are one of the critical pages of your eCommerce website as this is the page where all your customers can see that you have to sell. When adding your products never be in hurry. Take your time, re-verify all details about the product that you will add, and preview after adding them to ensure your customers will see the same that you want them to look after.
When adding your products keep 3 important points in mind that will keep your customer more engaging and the page will convert maximum visitors into customers.
- Detailed Product descriptions
- High quality product image
- Product categories to remove the confusion
13) Enable multiple payment options
Do you remember when was the last time you made an online purchase and the payment method you used? If you will visit the eCommerce site, they are offering multiple payment options to their customers to eradicate the issue of losing a sale due to payment options. As per the study, eCommerce stores lose their 30% of sales due to less payment method or insecure payment option.
Everyone may have a visa and master debit and credit card but most of the cards provider has different charges on payment gateways due to which customer hunts for any other type of payment option to pay to buy the product. And those other payment options could be:
- Paypal
- Pioneer
- Stripe
- Apple pay
- Cashapp (for US based customer)
- Amazon pay or UPI based payment method
As per the study: The right payment method is considered an important component to close a visitor into a sale. More than 50% of the sale is declined due to insecure and complicated payment methods.
To make you better understand the types of payment, below are the types of payment methods that you can use into your eCommerce website to scale your business revenue.
A. Redirect payment method
B. Checkout on-site and payment off-site
C. On-site payment
14) Finalize your ecommerce shipping solutions
You are selling tangible products. Customers shifted to online purchasing to get their product on time, to their given address, and undamaged.
Shipping is one of the most important factors of any eCommerce website as if the product is not shipped on time or any damaged product is shipped to the customer then it can result in the complaint of returning/replacing/refund of the product. This won’t stop here but will result in getting negative feedback, fewer customers visiting your website, and less revenue.
To avoid these unwanted scenarios you choose your shipping setting wisely.
You should ask yourself the below-mentioned questions:
- Will you be storing all your inventory in a warehouse?
- Will you be utilizing drop shipping?
- Will you be using UPS, Fedex, USPS or any other shipment services to deliver and track order?
- What will you ship your product in?
- What size of packaging you want and what material you will use to pack the order? And much more.
Once you get the answers to all the questions and feel confident about the shipment of the products then there are 2 key components that you should keep in mind while finalizing shipping options.
- Determining your shipping policy that includes fees and carriers, domestic or international, who are you shipping with, and if the rate is fixed or variable?
- Select an eCommerce shipping solution like if you are going to store all inventory at a warehouse or will utilize drop shipping.
Key points to test before launching your site
There are total 6 major key points that every site owner should perform before making the site live. There are 6 key role for 6 personnel that have played vital role in making your website a website of your dream. To assure the success of your ecommerce website below are the important points you should perform at any cost.
1. Writer:
You might have written the content for your website and a description of every product. Having a preview of the content from a 3rd eye can play a vital role in launching a 100% informed, strong, and trusted website.
Writer job will be to check:
- Spelling, grammar, and punctuations page-wise, and product wise
- Form by filling it to confirm if the instructions are accurate and the form is successfully submitting
- Site speed, page size, load time
- Context to assure you have unique content and reasonable reason to attract customers
2. Designer:
Designers eye are called as the eagle eye as they spot when design doesn’t look pretty and missing the intent.
Designer will spot about:
- Compatibility of the themes, images across the browsers and screens
- Fonts if looking authentic and not funny
- Size of image, displaying correctly and loading quick
3. Web developer:
Web developer creates the backbone and he knows the inner workings of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Below are the few important technical terms a web developer can check:
- Testing URLs of each page to assure they are working
- Checking W3C code used in the coding while building an eCommerce website to get assured if the page is valid
- Minify technique that is used to speed up the site by combining and compressing website code
- 404 pages (page not found) developer can fix the one and also can keep a standby page as a redirection for the customer if any of the pages is requested and not working
- Checking Favicon a small branding opportunity in the form of little iconic images that shows up in the address bar and tabs
4. Search Engine Optimizer
An SEO professional focuses on marketing and search engine guidelines to help you rank your site rank at a better position and ensures is visible to your customers. Expert looks after:
- 301 redirects to make sure your content is not considered as a duplicate due to old and new website URL
- Making sure Title tags/Metadata and meta description is done perfectly with unique content
- Checking HTML Sitemap is they are accurate in both XML and HTML as it helps search engines and users to find your pages
- Using Google Analytics and Web Master tools to set up and analyse the data
- Social Medial Integration checking if the icons are redirecting to the real page you want
- SERP Display to be checked to see if your page is correctly shown
5. Network Administrator
Without the administration support, it is tough to run any website especially an eCommerce website with huge traffic that has a hanging knife every minute of getting crashed or hacked. To prevent these issues technical expertise is required 24/7. They do:
- Monitoring of site and each page to confirm if they are working
- Having Backup System to give continue shopping experience to your customer even if the existing server goes down
- • Get SSL Secure certificate to protect visitors’ identity and data using encrypted pages Traffic loads splitting by using third party tools to prevent site crashes from heavy traffic
6. Preview, test and Launch your website
Make sure you test everything before making the site live. A successful site launch is only when every feature and page of the site is working perfectly fine across the screens.
Anything that is not working as it should make your customer abandon your site and you will lose the potential customer and a possible sale.
Points that you should test and check before making it live are:
- If a link is working fine?
- Payments are processing as it should
- Site looks good and works on all small and big screens
- Does check works properly?
- Are all functions and features of the store working?
- Does your store works well on mobile?
- Perform the website testing on all browsers
- Set up the stores setting if there is something needed to be as per the business requirement.
2 Examples of Successful Online Stores – Done By i-Verve
New to online selling? Worried about how other eCommerce businesses have made their store, went through development journey and what result have they got shifting to online selling by building result-oriented eCommerce website cum application? Check out the 2 examples from i-verve that are performing outstanding still.
1. Custom T-Shirt building platform with flexible requirements for US based customers.
Atomic Archer Jerseys is a trusted online custom t-shirt building platform for US-based customers where customers can craft their own choice of t-shirt design, color, size, features and more, and order accordingly.
The niche of the store is to sell only Jerseys online within the boundaries of the USA and across the Globe. It has many options in jerseys like Short sleeve jersey, Hooded jersey, Long sleeve jerseys, and much much more can be found on a visit.
Our 5 member team worked for 3 months and 2 weeks to create an all-new niche-based online marketplace based on PHP and Magento Frame work. It was a challenge but our developers took it as an opportunity and worked hard on the backend, frontend along maintenance.
The online store developed by i-Verve as per the clients requirement with the following features:
Key Features:
- Team Roster Builder
- Custom Products Builder (Jerseys)
- Brand Apparel
- Quick Quote tool
- Cancel Order Feature
- Advance Custom Option
- Image Gallery
- Customized Theme Template
- Customized email with T-shirt builder
- Mobile Optimized website
- Share product design link on facebook
Other Features:
- Swap product color and size
- Multiple product customization options
- Preview customized desgin
- Save customized design preview
- Share customized design
- Support multi-store
- Editable product design pattern
- Save customized design to my account
- Design templates management
Result we are proud of:
- 25% ROI increased
- 72% traffic increased
- 63% visitors increased
- 60% order increased
2. An online marketplace for electronic products
Electronic Expeditors (EE), established in 1953, is the leading company in the US specialized in the sales and distribution of electronic components, tools, and systems sourced from industry-leading brands. They deliver customized solutions for any project and believe that there is no one solution for any problem but every problem has a different solution.
EE is known for making and distributing passive electronic and electro-mechanical parts. They serve Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Electronic Contract Manufacturers (ECMs), and Maintenance and Repair Organizations (MROs).
We built, shipped the expectation of our client
Key Features:
- Call for price extension
- Follow up customers with fully automated emails
- Quotable products
- Live chat feature
- Credit line payment option for wholesaler customer group
- Magento 1 to Magento 2 data migration
- Magento Up-gradation
Other features:
- Credit line payment option for wholesaler customer group
- Easy and simple website workflow
- Website theme integration
- Mobile switch facility and SEO friendly website
- Performance Optimization
- Full page cache functionality
Results we’re Proud of:
- 49% Increase in sales
- 64% Additional site traffic recorded
- 60% Improved user performance
- 70% Speed Magento 2 store
Wrapping Up
A good ecommerce site is more than just a place to sell products. It’s where a business can create an experience that strengthens their brand, draws in new customers, and converts casual shoppers into loyal ambassadors. Choosing the right ecommerce platform and having a marketing strategy to create a successful online store can give you a head-start in being an ecommerce success.
Building your ecommerce store is equally challenging as it is exciting. The process is bit lengthy but not impossible of making the ecommerce store from scratch, launching it and making it profitable by giving more weight on marketing and branding.
First things comes first. Creating a site is not the aim but creating a conversion oriented site is the goal as the site is not just a site but more than that. A successful online store is the combination of a choosing the right ecommerce development platform, hiring the expert ecommerce developers and having strong marketing strategy.
