How to Create an E-commerce Business Website
The purpose of this post is to walk through the process of how to create an e-commerce business website. The thought of creating your own e-commerce site may seem daunting, but this article will give you a step-by-step guide on getting your store up and running. After you finish reading the article, check out our domain tools to pick out a domain for your e-commerce site!
Step 1: Choose a Domain
One of the most important steps of creating your e-commerce site is choosing a great domain name. Your domain name says a lot about your e-commerce business and is important in attracting customers and building your brand. To find keyword domains for your particular niche, try our type-in-traffic finder or bulk keyword checker tools. If you have some domain ideas and want to see if they’re available, then go over to our instant domain finder and see what domains are available. We offer some great tutorials on choosing domain names as well as finding registars so be sure to check those out.
Step 2: Select Your E-commerce Platform
Fortunately for new entrants into the e-commerce market, there is no shortage of e-commerce platforms available to help you get your site up and running fast. These different platforms fall under several different categories:
1. Completely Hosted E-Commerce Website Platforms
The simplest and quickest way to get an e-commerce website up and running is to use a hosted e-commerce platform. This type of e-commerce website is hosted by a company that provides customer e-commerce software from there servers. All the end-user has to do is sign up, select a pre-made template, and add his or her products (a great example of this type of site is Shopify.com). The trade-off with this type of platform is control and price. E-commerce business websites that run on these platforms can expect a monthly fee and more limited control over what they can do to their site. However, usually a store can be configured with absolutely no HTML or programming knowledge.
2. Semi-hosted E-Commerce Website Platforms
This type of platform is a compromise between completely hosting an e-commerce business website yourself and using a complete e-commerce hosting platform. Generally this type of platform allows the user to put up his own site and content, and then transfer over to a third-part website to actually handle the processing of orders. A couple great examples of this kind of solution are 1ShoppingCart and Google Checkout. This solution gives e-commerce business owners more flexibility in the presentation of their products, without having to worry about handling credit card processing on their own site. Some of these providers are free (but take a percentage of sales), and some have a monthly fee.
3. Standalone E-Commerce Website Software
The most flexible, but also the most complex method of creating an e-commerce business website it to use e-commerce website software and to install it on your web host (check out our article on how to find a good host). With this type of platform, the e-commerce business website owner would download the software and install it on his servers. The software would provide an administrative section for managing products, but it would be up to the site owner to apply his own templates, code or install different plugins, as well as set up payment gateways and merchant accounts for accepting credit cards. A couple of the most popular e-commerce website applications are ZenCart and OSCommerce.
Step 3: Set up Products
No matter which way you go with choosing a e-commerce platform, you will be provided with some kind of administrative interface to manage your inventory. Once you have your site configured, you should add all of your products and assign them categories as you like. Each platform will have its own instructions on how to do this.
Step 4: Make Some Money!
Once your website and store is setup, it’s time to start the real work! Check out our how-to guide for tips on monetizing your domain names and our domain development video tutorial series (available to premium members) for more info on starting your e-commerce empire.
Now that your ready to start your e-commerce business website, sign up for our premium membership trial for only $3 to find the perfect domain name for your online store.
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