Monday, December 28, 2009

Ecommerce Website Design - How to Build an Online Shop

By Paul Abbot

Want to put your business online? Many people would be surprised how simple it is to set up an ecommerce business. For very little outlay you can set up an international ecommerce trading business.

The tips and information below will help you make the best use of your resources. They will help you get up and running quickly and avoid the costly mistakes that many first-time novices make.

You will need to establish who is going to build the site at an early stage. Building the site yourself will be less costly, but can take up your valuable time. One popular choice is to use a Yahoo Store. There is a monthly charge for using their services, but it will permit you to begin selling in a brief period of time for a moderate fee.

The second option is to use a web developer to create the site for you. Use a developer that has a portfolio of online stores that you can see. Most developers will customise an existing ecommerce software program for you, although some may create a solution from scratch.

Some common packages that your web developer may talk to you about include Zencart, Magento and osCommerce. These programs will allow you to add products to your store and receive online payments.

You can develop a decent store using any of these software solutions. One of the major things that you should look out for is how easy the 'back-end' is to use. This is the part of the website that you will use to update your store with new products, modify prices and make general promotions. You will be working at this interface on a regular basis, so make sure that you are at ease with it and that you fully comprehend its capabilities.

Getting your online store onto the Internet is just the first stage. Successful stores are able to make more profits because they have far-reaching statistics available to hand and they are able to make executive decisions based on these numbers. If you have not had to collect business data before, here are a few examples of what you ought to be looking for Number of visitors per day, total of sales per day, which items are top sellers, what was the result of sales promotions, how much profit is made for every dollar spent in promotion.

You should be able to get this data from most online store software. Integrating Google Analytics into your web site is a further smart move. Google make this product available for free, allowing you to check traffic and advertising spend on your site.

These steps will help you to rapidly set up a successful business online..

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