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starting a website is likely to be promoting them. Have you
considered, though, that you could sell your products directly,
online? This is e-commerce - basically like a much better
version of mail order, where the descriptions can be any length
and your customers can communicate with you as much as they like
before they buy. To start up an e-commerce 'web shop', however,
you need to take a look at e-commerce software.
The Free and the Expensive
E-commerce software, more than any other kind of web software,
varies massively in price. There are e-commerce solutions out
there that cost thousands of dollars, but at the same time there
is open source software like osCommerce that you can download
for nothing. What's the difference? In my experience, very
little.
If you want to make a good profit from your website, then, you
should really be looking at the free e-commerce solutions, or
alternatively writing your own. It's madness to pay thousands
for e-commerce software when you can get software custom-built
for your website for a few hundred - or, of course, for free, if
you're a programmer yourself.
Integration and Templates
One of the most important things about an e-commerce shop is
that it shouldn't appear separate from the rest of your website:
you should make sure to keep its design consistent with your
site's overall look and feel. In most e-commerce software, the
way to change the design is with templates: you should look into
how difficult it will be to turn your site's design into a
Web Design: Integrating e-CommerceFor web developers who prioritize graphics and design work, reconciling the art of web development with building an e-commerce platform can be somewhat problematic. Design and programming are the foci - and these are the skills developers spend years refining, weekends investigating, and long nights tweaking. That s why for many people providing web design solutions, the e-commerce dimension of building a site can often be a bit unruly - if not downright utilitarian. Here, it s the art and science of web development that s the fun part. Juggling a variety of e-commerce vendors for different e-commerce ..
template, or get a template version of it made for you. In some
cases, you might even find it easier to come up with a whole
system of your own instead of producing templates, if you have a
lot of unique information about your products that you want
customers to be able to see.
Hosted Solutions
The idea of going to all that trouble and setting up e-commerce
on their site only to make a grand total of zero sales is what
puts a lot of people off. In this case, you might appreciate
hosted solutions such as Yahoo Stores (smallbusiness.yahoo.com)
that offer you a ready-made e-commerce store to drop your
products into and link to from your website. The monthly fees
and setup fees can be a little high, but it at least gives you
an opportunity to dip your toe in the water without getting too
burned if it all goes wrong. If you really want to try things on
the cheap, take a look at eBay Stores (stores.ebay.com), which
lets you list products for roughly the same price as listing
them in eBay's auctions section.
Things to Do and Avoid
When you're opening an e-commerce store, there are some things
that you should always remember to do, and some things that you
really shouldn't do. Here's a little advice.
Describe products well. You're not limited by space here: put in
every detail that you can think of about every product you sell.
If you don't take the time to put in all the information you can
get your hands on, don't be surprised when nothing sells.
I Used to Be A Hosting Refugee
Back in 1997 when I first started out doing web design, learning HTML, building pro-bono websites for non-profits, I utilized the cheapest hosting I could find. In most cases, I used free hosting, and well, I got what I paid for.
Soon thereafter I started my business, also on a free hosting server. The server was up and down, never had much traffic, and no wonder - it was down when the search engines came around! So, my site never got indexed. No indexing means no traffic. Bummer.
In 1999, my web design business was growing nicely, and it finally came to a point where I needed to prov ..
Make searches work. Any e-commerce site needs to be easily
searchable - at an absolute minimum, someone should be able to
type in the name of any product and have the product's page
appear. You should never, ever say 'no results found': display a
selection of your most popular items instead, with a message
saying "we couldn't find that item... maybe you were looking for
one of these?"
Sort results by most popular first (that is, best selling
first). Whatever you do, don't sort by price unless the customer
asks for it: sorting by lowest price first makes your customers
look at the cheapest items before the rest, while highest price
first make you look like you're trying to fleece them.
Have pictures. It's commercial suicide not to attach a picture
to every single item description, and preferably more than one.
Make them small, but make sure users can click them to display a
bigger version, if they want to - this saves on both screen
space and bandwidth.
About the author:
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of
href="http://EclipseDomainServices.com">Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
Lee AsherOpening a Web Shop with E-Commerce Software
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