Steps To Building E-commerce Website That Your Consumers Love

When you get your favorite pair of jeans or your loved gadget shipped directly to your doorstep, you might think the process is quite straightforward. However, does it really easy or it all looks like to be one?

Here’re the steps to building an e-commerce store that consumers love.

Steps To Build an E-commerce Website

After having worked with several clients, in the domestic as well as international markets, we take this opportunity to share our learning with you all. The following step-by-step guide will not only help you set up your own e-commerce store in a quick time but in a professional and systematic manner. Keep reading.

Start With the Basics - Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Begin by launching an MVP rather than releasing a perfect solution. For unawares, an MVP is a market-ready product with the most important features required to satisfy your customers.

Doing this not only helps you start early but lets you learn from the initial users. And their feedback is nothing less than gold as you get to know what’s missing or what’s being disliked. You can then prepare your action plan accordingly.

To prepare an MVP you need to list down basic features you want to have in your website and keep aside the ones that carry less importance. Like having a reward program from the very beginning isn’t a wise choice while a seamless checkout experience is certainly one crucial aspect to consider.

Select Domain Name And Hosting Provider

Select a domain name that’s relatable to your brand and easy to remember for your audience. The shorter the length of your domain the easier it is for your customers to remember it. Though it is recommended to select ‘.com’ extension, you can choose country specific extensions as well (like .co.uk if you hail from the United Kingdom or .com.au if you are from Australia or .in for India).

Next, look out for a domain name and hosting provider. The popular ones include Godaddy, Namecheap, and Bluehost. There are plenty more options available who offer similar services. While choosing a hosting plan make sure you get enough bandwidth to upload products and handle traffic. At an initial stage, a shared plan can also solve the purpose while at a later stage you might be wanting a dedicated server.

Choose an E-commerce Platform

Once you are through the above-mentioned steps, select an e-commerce platform. For beginners and self-doers, it is recommended to choose a platform that offers drag-and-drop functionality. In that case, you can opt for Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce. They are affordable and easy to learn and set up.

Whereas, if you are looking to offer a professional interface with dynamic experience and features right from the word go, then consider platforms like Magento and BigCommerce. For setting up a website in Magento or BigCommerce you’d need experienced web developers. This also asks for additional costs so be prepared for the same.

Pick A Theme

Each platform has pre-built themes and templates to get you started. According to your product range and taste, choose a theme.

Despite all things covered, you’d need a few design modifications. Look out for a designer to help you with the same. Additionally, you need to take care of branding, include a logo, optimized images, and actionable content.

At later stages, you can always hire a web development company to do the necessary alterations and customizations because at some point you’d want professionals to take over.

Install Useful Plug-ins

Aside from securing a domain name, finalizing the theme and everything in between, you need to install plug-ins on your website to boost your marketing efforts like email gatherers, newsletter or subscription pop-ups and reward program alerts. Platforms like Wix and Shopify have a built-in plug-in library for users to choose from.

Make sure that you don’t overload your website with third-party plug-ins. Just include the most important ones. The reason for this is that not all of the plug-ins interact with each other or in simple words are not compatible with one another, which can result in a degraded user experience.

Hence, perform good research before installing them on your website. Read reviews from the users, check out the rating and choose from only the popular ones. Also, ensure that the plug-in developers offer support.

Test It Before You Nail It

Finally when you are ready to go, take out substantial time to test for flaws and bugs that might affect experience of the users. Experience the entire flow of the website yourself. You can also ask your peers and colleagues to do the same. This will give you clarity of the product developed and understandings can help you improve before you launch it.

Wrapping Up

Follow the series of steps mentioned above to build a reliable and trusted e-commerce website for your business.

Vaibhav Shah is the Founder and CEO of Techuz InfoWeb, a top web development company delivering web and mobile app solutions using latest technology stack. Being an engineer, he has the vision to enhance user experience and create competitive products for their clientele.