Trying to run a business without a website is almost impossible in the modern world. This is where most of your users will come to learn about your business, along with being a great place to sell goods and make some money. With the costs of something like this, though, it can often feel out of reach. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring all of the tips and tricks you will need to get started on your own DIY ecommerce project.
Content:
One of the most important parts of any website is the content which calls it home, and this is the first area you should be thinking about. All of the information on your site needs to tie together, following similar themes, and consistently using keywords which describe your business throughout. In some cases, the products you sell will come with descriptions from the manufacturers themselves, but these are best avoided, as systems like Google will be able to tell that its been copied.
Images:
Likewise, product images are also critical to an ecommerce store, and you will need to start thinking about this element of the job, too. This sort of website will always have loads of images, often taking up a lot of space and making pages load slowly. There are loads of free software options out there which enable you to bulk resize and compress photos, making it very easy to solve this sort of issue before it impacts user experience. You always have to make sure that your images are named appropriately.
Payments:
With all of your content and images ready to go, you will be on your way to getting started with the main build. Before the real work can start, though, you will have to do some research, as it will be time to choose your payment gateway. This sort of company makes it very easy to take card payments from customers. But, they will all offer different rates, charges, and benefits, making it a good plan to research all of the options you have available. Stripe and PayPal are two of the biggest out there, and offer very good deals on their services.
A Domain:
A domain name is the URL which connects your website to the outside world. This can have a surprising impact on your ability to get your name out there, with simpler domains being much more powerful than those which are long and hard to remember. You can find this option very affordably across the web, but might need some help with it comes to installing it. In some cases, you will be able to buy your domain through the people hosting your new site, and this is usually the best approach to take.
Building The Site:
Building the actual site will be one of the easier parts of this work, with all of the tools on the market which are designed to take work out of your hands. An ecommerce solution can be found for practically any business type, making the process a matter of dragging and dropping what you’d like to show on your website, instead of dealing with complex code. You will probably have to talk to support once or twice during the process. This will be worth it, though, once your website is off the ground.
Securing It:
As part of the trust your customers have in you and your website, all ecommerce sites have to maintain a strong level of security. An SSL certificate, for example, is a very cheap item, but can have a huge impact on keeping your site from getting in trouble. Along with this, you can also use online security audit tools to make sure that your website doesn’t have any big vulnerabilities which you haven’t noticed. Even something as simple as having an email address in plain text can be enough to result in website-slowing spam.
SEO:
Finally, as the last area to consider, SEO is critical if you want your website to be found by those on the outside. Companies like SEOptimer have excellent tools aimed at helping newbies to the world of SEO to improve their search presence. They can give you very clear advice which will have a huge impact on your site at launch. Of course, though, this can be an area worth paying for, as most people will struggle to understand the complexity of SEO. Hopefully, this post will inspire you to start working harder on the time you put into your next ecommerce site. Handling a project like this yourself might be hard, but it isn’t impossible, and there are loads of tools out there to help you.
This is an article provided by our partners'network. It might not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of our editorial team and management.
Contributed content
