Last updated at 23:57, Sunday, 02 September 2012

Setting up your ecommerce business can be a complicated and time consuming task. There are so many things to think about – design, tools, functionality and marketing to name a few.

Website design is vital in retaining customers. Your site needs to look professional and be visually appealing to the eye. Hiring a website designer can be quite costly, so finding an ecommerce platform that offers templates as a part of the package is a great solution and costs a fraction of the price. Make sure that the template offers settings that are customizable to your needs, so you can control your websites’ layout, add slideshows, banners, change fonts, colours and much more. If you don’t know HTML and CSS (web programming languages), a good platform will take care of that and translate your English into computer speak.

Once you have designed your website, it’s just as important to ensure high usability for the end user. You need your site to be simple to navigate and pleasurable to use. Remember that many customers have little time and patience when they hit a stumbling block and will tend to click off the site immediately. That means fewer sales for you.

Add functional features such as a shopping cart that is reliable, secure and accepts credit cards (VISA, MasterCard) and PayPal payments. Offer checkout pages in different languages – after all, the internet’s reach is global. Automatically detecting whether someone is utilising a mobile phone when visiting your site is priceless – an optimised mobile shopping feature will do that.

Certain top-notch ecommerce hosts offer an App Store feature for business owners. This means that you can increase your website’s functionality through a multitude of apps. For example: email marketing apps, social media apps, ‘upsell’ apps that upsell products when your customer is at the checkout page, and feedback/survey apps that automatically contact your customers after they buy your products and ask them for feedback. These are just a few out of many that your business can benefit from.

Getting it right will not only save you money, but also earn it.

First published at 15:40, Friday, 17 August 2012
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk