Easy Steps to Building Your Own eCommerce Site

An effective, easy to use and update eCommerce site can greatly bring in more traffic and more sales into your web page. Your site must be easy to spot, easy to navigate with your latest products in it plus with a useful, product search feature.

Online payment is a must and you must have a reliable shipping partner. Decide on your products and how you will source and ship them even before you think of your eCommerce site. When everything else is decided upon, studied and costed, this is when you move to your eCommerce site.

Step #1: Register Your Domain Name

A lot of importance must be given to the domain name of your site. The right domain name can make it a huge success. It does not have to be the exact name of your product – just make sure that it is easy to remember and key in to the browser fields.

This is why it is important to register your domain name once you are settled with its name at once. You may not have your ready site up but at least you know that the domain name is yours already. You can just point the URL to your Facebook page, if you have it already.

If this is your first time buying a domain name, you can settle for the 12-month period and then just extend it if your business pushes through.

Step #2: Choose A Web Hosting Partner

Choose a hosting partner that can provide all of your needs. Identify the site’s needs in terms of bandwidth, uptime and storage capacity. Here are some more features that you should consider when selecting a hosting partner:

• Features that enhance eCommerce activities like online billing, shopping cart application etc.
• Free credits for online marketing of your site like Google Adsense credits, Facebook ad credits.
• Reputation of the hosting company in terms of reliability and customer service

Step #3: Build Your Website

Build your website – you can start this even way back during product conceptualization. Some web hosting partners even provide site building tools, for free or as an upgrade, so that you can set up your site faster.

Some features that you may want to consider for an e-commerce site are:

• Login or sign up features so that customers can have their own accounts
• Email subscription so that you can easily email customers your updated catalogs
• Easy hooking up to a content management system or a CMS

Step #4: Create A PayPal Account

Create a PayPal account so that you can facilitate online payment quicker. Even if you have an online shopping cart built and even if you have registered to local banks for the incorporation of credit card payments, PayPal just makes it a lot easier for you to sell things to those who are actively buying and selling online items (which should be your target market).

Step #5: Upload Your Products

Once you have your hosting, shopping cart and bank accounts up, upload your products online so that you can test your site. It is best to upload your beta or test site into a subset of your page, such as www.yourURL.com/test so that it will not be viewed by everyone who sees your site.

Step #6: Market Your eCommerce Site

When you have your site and products updated, along with your accounts, it is time to launch your site and market it through popular channels like social networks, the search engines (think SEO) and through ads in relevant pages.

Remember to keep in mind your target market so that you will not lose focus as you decide where you want to market and why.