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5 Tips For Companies Launching E-Commerce Websites

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cheapmaket001

1. If you are building an ecommerce site make sure your images are good quality otherwise this will put people off your products. Although be careful not to make the file size of the images too large otherwise this will impact your page load time.​
 
  1. Choose the right platform, dont rely on what your developer tells you. If they cant use the platform you like, find another developer. There are many superb platforms, such as Virtuemart and Trading Eye, there are also some very poor solutions, such as oscommerce and Actinic. Oscommerce is old, outdated, clunky and very poor compared to newer systems. Actinic is a software based on a PC, so if you want more than one admin user you need to have it installed on your computer, which is just madness in these modern times.
  2. Choose a cheap gateway, some gateways like CCBill charge upto 16% of the transaction, if your profit margin is only 10%, you will actually loose money on every sale. SagePay only charge £20 per month for any size transaction for upto 333 transactions per month.
  3. Make sure it is user friendly, dont forget disability access is a legal requirement, not a novelty.
  4. Quick loading, use XHTML and CSS code correctly
  5. Marketing, Marketing, Marketing, Offiline and online, let people know you exist.
  6. Get your delivery and tax correct, nothing worse than getting the sale, then spending all your profit on tax or delivering your products.
  7. Dont cut corners, a real shop will cost you tens of thousands of pounds, so even though it is online, dont go to a developer because they are the cheapest. Most of our work is taking over crap companies who charge £200 or so to make a website. There is not enough money in £200, or even £1000 to dedicate to a real start up site for you. For SEO, Optimisation of code, marketing campaigns, Content Copyright, Newsletter Systems with template setup, and all consultation at the beginning to make sure the site is built exactly right for the business needs, rather than just some cloned template system.
 
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cheapmaket001 said:
1. If you are building an ecommerce site make sure your images are good quality otherwise this will put people off your products. Although be careful not to make the file size of the images too large otherwise this will impact your page load time.​
Click to expand...

2. Having contact information on your site..................:D
 
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Tips for companies launching E-Commerce websites. Consumer trust, Monitoring statistics, Keep it smile, Information overload, Remember to advertise.
 
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cheapmaket001 said:
1. If you are building an ecommerce site make sure your images are good quality otherwise this will put people off your products. Although be careful not to make the file size of the images too large otherwise this will impact your page load time.​
Click to expand...
Exactly ... I would like to comment on that ....
If you are using images give option to the user that .. he/she can view the images in all small to large size
Thumbnails and large image size after clicking on it

Regards
 
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Also include some kind of data capture such as newsletter subscription so you can keep in touch with customers.

Clare
 
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(1) What you start of with will have, at best, half the conversion rate it could have. So make sure the site can be split-tested.

(i.e. Have that built in.)

(2) Make sure you can track everything from the moment someone arrives (and where they came from) to the completion of a sale. NEVER use a 3rd party checkout system that doesn't allow you to do that. It's a false economy.

Steve
 
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To reiterate, one of the most important aspects of ecommerce is marketing Too many people think they can just create a shop and customers will simply show up. Marketing is probably the single biggest expenditure of any online shop. And the marketing should be multi-faceted. Consider offline AND online.

We build ecommerce sites and a fully functional online store (using Magento) will cost at least £7-£10k, but if you have a smallish (<50) number of products, and you want to test the water, then a Wordpress ecommerce site could be a more cost effective start. This won't have all the functionality of a fully developed system like Magento, but it could be enough for a proof of concept. You're still looking at around £2-3k to set up. If anyone is interested we are offering both types at siteroom.co.uk

Any online store needs great SEO, and a good MANAGED Google Adwords campaign. We work with partners who make Adwords pay for itself several times over for many companies.
 
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It is better to sell 10 products well than 100 products badly. Make sure your product images are of good quality (image size for page load times is important as mentioned earlier, but I mean a product photo that clearly shows the product with good lighting and multiple images of different angles, zoom lengths).

Also, well written product descriptions that give people the details that make them feel comfortable about buying something online they can’t hold and study like they would do in a shop. Depending on the type of product, different things will be more relevant than others, but things like dimensions, the build materials and quality, the texture or feel of an item, its weight. Think M&S adverts describing food, by the end of it, you want what they have shown you!
 
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Firstly, I'd echo what people have so far said regarding quality: beware false economy.

1) Your website is the online representation of your company. A poor quality site with broken links or poorly dimensioned images will not build trust with prospective customers and will lose you countless impulse sales.

2) Be readily contactable. A perfect example of this to me is when my fiancee was booking flying lessons for her Dad. The site itself wasn't wonderful and she asked my opinion. The first thing I said was "Phone them". I wouldn't have trusted £120 to their website. However, they had a well-placed phone number on the main page that allowed us to contact them with having to hunt for it. They were very friendly and sounded legit; they got the order :)

3) Proper use of colour: ensure your site colours are working toward, rather than against, the site's purpose (not using blue for food websites etc.).

4) Site analysis: I don't have much experience here (yet :)) but believe that analysing your site's (and individual page's) performance is an important part of improving your customers' experience.

Lastly, I suppose the general idea is: Sell something they'd like to buy, help them find you and make it as simple as they can to buy it.

Hope this is constructive.

Best wishes,
Newky.
 
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Oh I'd like to add speling and gremmer Nothing puts me of sites more then ones with speling mistakes and difficult to understand sentence structure because it makes you think that their products may be similar.


Urgh, writing like that is painful. :D
 
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Plenty of good advice on here already...

Get a good CMS (content management system) so you can keep your site up to date easily.
Contact details - no PO Box numbers etc. Customers like to see a genuine office address and landline phone number.
SEO - critically important. You might have the best idea since sliced bread, but if people can't find it, they won't buy it.

Cheers
Phil
 
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1st rule,

get it launched as best as you can within your budget as soon as possible..

make some cash, reinvest, repeat
Click to expand...

I like this piece of advice, basically because that's what we are doing.

We would love to launch with a fully bespoke site backed up by a high impact adwords campaign, finances dictate otherwise.

We have had to start smaller, work on marketing it ourselves and see how things go, then make a bit of cash and reinvest in the site, possibly a brand new site built to our exact requirements (once we know what those are ;) )


Cheers

Stu
 
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