Building A Successful Online Shop

I get asked often by my clients on what I feel makes an online shop successful or a failure. Simple question for a web designer specializing in e-commerce to answer you would say? Well... not really.

Building an online shop for your company is not as easy as people may think. Yes, there are alot of tools out there for merchants to use for help. However there isn’t a “How To Guide” on e-commerce; well not one that will actually help you anyway! So I thought I would write a little article on some areas that you should pay attention to in selling online.

The Difference Between a website and a online shop
Seems to simple doesn’t it, but many people fall into the same trap of thinking an online shop can be in the context of a information website or blog for instance , however this unfortunately isn’t the case. An online shop needs to be designed & laid out in such a way that a potential customer doesn’t think about the money they are about to spend, Getting the customer from the homepage to the checkout stages of a website as quickly as possible. Something that is also very big on information or blog website are advertisements...Online shops should never have adverts that don’t link to an internal page.

The Right Design
One of the major areas of concern within is the shops design, So easy to get wrong an yet can be so hard to get right at the same time. One tip i always give is to keep the design on theme with your products or services, no point in setting a shop up if the design represents   school supplies if your selling computers is there. Another area of a shop’s design that should have some thought put into is the layout , Keep it simple & clean...nothing worse than a shop you cant navigate to where you want to go.

Payment Options
This is a tricky area to discuss as i’m aware alot of the social blog viewers are American and as i’m from the UK it’s hard to advise on payment processors. However a payment solution that everybody is familiar with is paypal , most people that shop online have had some interaction with their solution however paypal isn't the best service to use with an online shop as their transaction fee’s are generally very high and can easily mount up and eat into the profit of a new company. It’s very important to shop around and get the best deal from the company that give you and your company the services & tools you need.

SEO
Yes , commonly known as the most boring part of e-commerce , a long winded and potentially painful job for you to have to do. Know their are companies that offer SEO services...my company for example, however you have to be extremely careful in employing an agency to do help you with this area , cost can mount up to £1000’s and not always work , SEO is a trial and error job and can take months for it to take effect. So be prepared for this and don’t think your efforts are being wasted.

Now i have only really covered some of the basics of online shopping , there so many more areas that need attention paying to them. For people that are thinking of getting into the world of e-commerce i would say go in with your eyes wide open of the work that is involved and don’t be scared to ask for help in areas your not sure about.

If you want to know some more or have a question you can email me on mike@woodydesign.co.uk or get in touch with me through twitter at www.twitter.com/woodydesign

Woody

Comments

[Jay]

Good advice, heres my online shop!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/Ajagee24701

[Alexander Ashe]

Regarding Payment Options in online shops i would take the route of google checkout. its free and they dont charge service frees. and its secure by them using Https://. i would defintly go for this. hope this helps :)

Alex

[Woody]

Yes, Google Checkout is a good payment processor , however their transaction times & transfer time can prove trouble-sum occassionaly.