What is an Ecommerce website and how to sell online
E.commerce websites are sites that consumers can purchase products or services online via a payment system, usually through payment gateways such as PayPal or Sagepay.
How to sell online
There are different types of E.commerce software packages that are available, more notably Drupalcommerce, Magentocommerce and X-Cart. The type of software that will be used for your E.commerce website will depend on individual requirements and what the web designer/developer would recommend. Some E.commerce websites will need to be very specific, the supplier may have many different products that have different attributes such as size, colour and price. The supplier may also want to add offers to their products such as 2 for 1 or buy 4 and get the 5th free, the E.commerce package that is used will need to be flexible and cater for these types of attributes.
Features of an E.commerce website
The standard features of an E.commerce website are as follows:
Manage categories and products
Unique URLs, title tags and Metatags for each product
Set shipping costs and weights
Manage stock levels
Manage, generate and print invoices
Add products to multiple categories
Set and manage offers
Add/edit content eg. text, images and PDFs
What makes a good E.commerce website?
We have compiled a list of a few things that we know would make a good E.commerce website, these points will help bring new and returning customers to your site.
Quality Images – good quality images means more sales, the photographs need to reflect the quality of your product. Hire a professional photographer to take photos of your product. Add additional images for one product if this will show-off the product more and make sure your website has a zoom feature allowing for customers to zoom in on the product.
Stick to the same theme – make sure you choose a theme for your website and make sure that you stick to this as this will allow for easy navigation throughout your website. Make sure that your product sections are easy to navigate through.
Social Bookmarking – customers may want to share your products with their friends via Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Include Social Bookmarking so they can do just that, this will increase your brand awareness and help with SEO.
Call to action buttons – encourage your customers to buy products, call for more details or contact us using call to action’s buttons, add these throughout your site to encourage people to interact.
Promotional Area – people are more often than not drawn to a promotional area of a website, most promotional areas are demonstrated as a slide show or as a block on the website, which will remain fixed no matter what page of the website you are on. Encourage people to buy products that are on sale or ones that are in a special deal, i.e 2 for 1.
Use SEO – SEO is so important for all websites not just E.commerce ones. Make sure that each page has targeted keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing and make sure all images are optimised with title tags.
Try different approaches – if a particular product or service isn’t getting the response you had hoped, perhaps try advertising in a different area of the website.
Use Google Analytics – Google Analytics will be able to prove how many visitors you have to your website, what pages they are visiting, how long they are on your website for and much more. You can then take this information and improve on pages where you are not receiving many visitors.
We have the capabilities to design, build and maintain an E.commerce site that will work for your business. The most recent E.commerce sites that we have built are Best Wishes Special Occasions Ltd in Lowestoft and New World Music in Bungay and have so far been a success story.
Talk to us today if you are thinking of selling online, call us on 01502 712800.