E-Commerce Web Design
E-commerce, or Electric Commerce, is a web site that allows for online commerce. That simple. It is also referred to as:
- Online store
- Shopping cart
- Selling online
- E-commerce web site
It’s all the same: if you want to sell goods and / or services online, you need e-commerce.
Chad Austin, Inc., handles all shapes and sizes of online companies and their associated e-commerce sites.
What you need to get started for an e-commerce web site:
Chad Austin, Inc., will help guide you through everying.
Domain
A domain is simply the unique web address (like yourbusiness.com) that people type into their browser to find your website online. You can get a dot-com, or try a Top Level Domain (TDL) where the name after the "dot" matters. An example would be if you were creating a site that sold golf accessories, you could acquire "yourcompany.golf." There are thousands of TDLs from which to choose.
Hosting
Robust hosting for e-commerce means your online store runs on a powerful, secure server that can handle heavy traffic, protect customer data, and keep your site running quickly and reliably—even during busy shopping times. It's also important the hosting is scalable so you can upgrade, should you ever need it.
SSL
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security certificate that encrypts the connection between your website and its visitors, protecting sensitive information like credit card numbers and login details, and showing customers they can trust your site (often seen as the padlock icon in the browser bar).
Merchant Account
A merchant account (with Gateway) for e-commerce is a special type of bank account that allows your online store to accept credit and debit card payments from customers and deposit those funds into your business bank account. PayPal is a popular option, but your bank will have this capability, too.
Web Security
Web security services, like those offered by providers such as Sucuri, protect your website from hackers, malware, and other online threats by monitoring for attacks, blocking suspicious traffic, and keeping your site safe and reliable for visitors.
Products
To build an e-commerce website, you’ll need detailed information about your products—such as names, descriptions, prices, images, sizes, and categories so customers can shop with confidence.
Taxes
Taxes for e-commerce are the sales taxes your online store must collect based on where your customers are located; your website can be set up to automatically calculate and add the correct tax at checkout so you stay compliant with state and local laws.
Shipping
Shipping methods for e-commerce are the delivery options you offer customers—such as standard, express, or local pickup—and your website can be set up to calculate costs automatically based on weight, location, or carrier rates.
Terms & Conditions
Terms and Conditions for e-commerce outline the rules of your online store—covering things like payments, shipping, returns, and privacy—and WooCommerce (the shopping cart CAI uses) usually provides a sample you can customize to fit your business.
Recipients
Email recipients for orders are the addresses your website sends order notifications to—so you and your staff instantly know when a purchase is made, and customers automatically receive their order confirmation.
What you might also want to consider:
If you’re going to be communicating online, you need to consider brand trust. If your email is a gmail or Hotmail- or other freebie email account, then that doesn’t instill buyer confidence. Buyers want to know the email is going to be arriving at the correct Inbox. For example, if you were communicating with Gary, from the shipping department of amazon.com, and he replied back with an email like garyb@gmail.com and not, shippingmanager@amazon.com, or garyb@amazon.com, wouldn’t you be suspicious as to why Gary was using a seemingly personal email account for business communication?
Chad Austin, Inc., offers cheap solutions for web-based email that can be associated with your business domain. Email pricing and plans can be found here.
Logo
Logos are the branding that will help visitors to your site believe you have confidence in your product and services. A logo should never be overlooked or taken lightly. Most logos stay with companies the duration of their existence; it becomes the staple of their presence (think Apple).
CAI offers professional logo development, more of which can be read about here.
Brochure Web Site
A brochure-style website serves as a professional online presence that complements your e-commerce store. While the e-commerce site is focused on transactions—showcasing products, managing carts, and processing payments—the brochure site highlights your brand identity, services, story, and credibility. It functions much like a digital business card or company brochure, giving visitors a clear overview of who you are, what you offer, and why they should trust your business.
Together, the two sites work hand in hand: the brochure site drives organic traffic with SEO-friendly content and reinforces your brand, while the e-commerce site provides the secure, streamlined platform for customers to make purchases. This combination not only boosts visibility in search engines but also builds customer confidence by presenting your business as polished, trustworthy, and authoritative.
Several reasons for an additional accompanying web site are:
- Separate bandwidth for folks wanting to shop, and for folks wanting to browse information about your company. This is more important for start-up e-commerce projects, but is applicable to any business that isn’t handling large volume traffic, as robust e-commerce hosting is usually sold in bandwidth-handling increments.
- SEO reason #1 – Search Engine Optimization is much harder to do with E-commerce alone, owed to the fact that the bulk of written content (that which matters most to SEO) is buried deeper than it is with a brochure site. It’s also much harder to change written content on a regular basis (which is in part, the basis for good SEO) within an e-commerce site.
- SEO reason #2 – Having a brochure site linked to your e-commerce site (and vice versa) means having two separate online entities linked together. This looks good to any Search Engine, as it means the Search Engines can show that there are two relevant web sites online connected to each other.
- SEO reason #3 – Many e-commerce sites are resellers, meaning they buy / obtain the bulk of their goods from wholesellers, then these sites sell at a discounted rate. This means multiple stores with the EXACT same written descritpion as supplied by the wholeseller. Search Engines factor a content's chronological existence: just how long has that content been online? So if several sites have the same written content for products, whoever went online first gets higher a consideration for search results within a Search Engine.
- SEO reason #4 – A lot of big e-commerce sites use accompanying blogs within their brochure to garner their traffic and help build SEO for their brand.
The cornerstone of Chad Austin, Inc., services is 30 years' experience in web design. You can read more about CAI web development here.