eCommerce Websites
Sell Your Products Online with eCommerce
Over the years, eCommerce capabilities have evolved to make products easier to discover and purchase through online retailers and marketplaces. B2B, B2C, small businesses, and large corporations have all benefited from eCommerce, which enables them to sell their goods and services at a scale that was not possible with traditional offline retail. Below, we answer some of the frequently asked questions about building eCommerce websites.
What is an eCommerce Website?
Simply put, eCommerce websites are built with one goal in mind—sell products. Whether you are selling five products or 5,000 products, the structure of the eCommerce site is essentially the same. There are few basic architectural features that are consistent across all platforms. These features are:
- Product catalog pages, or product index pages for categories and other filtering options
- Product showcase pages or product description pages
- Cart and Checkout functionalities
- Flexible payment option functionality
- Order and Inventory management
What Makes a Good eCommerce Website?
Several factors go into making a custom eCommerce website, but here are the basic elements that could take your site to the next level:
- Engaging, well-written product descriptions
- Organized product data
- High-quality, properly-sized product photography
- Simple checkout process and payment gateway solutions (e.g. authorize.net, stripe, etc.)
- Established analytics or tracking, like Google Analytics
Things to Keep in Mind for a Custom eCommerce Website
eCommerce websites are complex. And with all of the competition and white noise online today, it is becoming more difficult to make your products stand out among the competition. One of the best ways to overcome this challenge is to pay careful attention to the user journey, as well as the little details that build trust and confidence along the way. Keep these things in mind for your eCommerce website:
- Comprehensive product data validation is vital—don’t underestimate its complexity
- User Experience (UX) is critical when it comes to the product experience
- It’s important to choose the right payment gateways for your back-end management (e.g. authorize.net, stripe, etc)
- Give significant thought to how your supporting website content drives customers to your product pages (blog posts, videos, testimonials, company information, etc.)
What are My Options for a Custom eCommerce Website?
If you’re planning for an entirely new site, most likely you’re considering between a basic hosted solution or a more powerful CMS solution, like WooCommerce or Magento. We can help you discover what functionality you need, both for the visitor and for the back-end management, and what resources you will have on-hand to support the ongoing management of the website. This will help you to determine what solution is right for you.
If you are looking to redesign your current eCommerce site, and need help evaluating your current pain points, design needs, functionality requirements, and CMS options, we can help guide in the right direction.
See Our Work With eCommerce Websites
"As an e-commerce business in the paper crafting world, everything we do is visual. [They] brought a fresh, intelligent and youthful perspective to my company. My sales have already increased because of solutions that [they were] able to program for me."Gina K Owner of Gina K Designs