Open the Door to a Wider Global Market with E-commerce Website
January 12, 2010 |
Neha Arora
Over the last decade, as Internet has become a global marketplace, companies have increasingly used the online platform to sell their goods and services. No wonder, e-commerce websites have become an easy and effective way of selling your products and services online to a wider audience. Amazon and eBay are perfect examples of successful e-commerce websites. Your business can be open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. However getting a professional e-commerce website made is not a child’s play.
An e-commerce site should be well organized and easy to navigate and it should be clutter free
An e-commerce website is just like a grocery store where the right presentation plays an important role. Imagine if your site is cluttered, would anyone bother to buy products online from your site. An e-commerce site should be well organized and easy to navigate and it should be clutter free so that visitors can find the products they are looking for. There are various web development companies which provide customized e-commerce packages to the clients.
Any e-commerce web design package has some usual features such as HTML pages, free web hosting for 1 year, free domain name for 1 year, site validation in all major browsers, web 2.0 navigation, cascading style sheets, search engine friendly web design, site map and so on. The e-commerce package must also provide free Google Analytics so that you should be able to track your customers, process your transactions and analyze what are your sales per product over a period of time. This enables you to design your marketing campaign accordingly.
While choosing the e-commerce web design package, make sure the package includes unlimited number of products pages with categories, sub-categories along with product images. Your site must have the features that encourage the customers to buy as many products as possible and keep coming back for more. Your e-commerce website must have the quick and advanced search capabilities to enable customers locate products they are looking for.
The web development company must include in the e commerce website the facility to backup the database, manage accounts page, blog, feedback forms, gallery section and others. Besides the web design firm must provide you with easy online administration option to change multiple product prices simultaneously, add new products and pages, delete the old ones, and update product details and prices automatically.
One of the most important feature of e-commerce website is the payment gateway. Your customers must find it easy to pay. Therefore make sure the e-commerce web design package you choose includes secure online payment gateways such as PayPal, 2CheckOut, Authorize.Net, CC Avenue, Google Checkout among others. Apart from this an option to pay offline through offline payment processing such as cheque, money orders, offline credit card processing should also be included.
The shopping cart displays the items customers purchase and gives them the flexibility to add or remove products. The package must provide an integrated shopping cart system such as ZenCart, PDG Commerce, wCart, xCart and OSCommerce. Plus, your online store must have shipping module integrated with UPS, FedEx and others.
Usually web development companies provide a number of customized e-commerce components and solutions that can be tailor made to clients’ individual requirements. Even additional features can also be included on the client’s requirements such as live video streaming, integration of forum and more. Online shopping is becoming more and more popular day by day and e-commerce website is the best medium to reach the wider audience.
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