Once you have decided to start an eCommerce business, you should budget a portion of your startup capital for a professional design firm to create your website. An eCommerce site is much different than a blog or website that has no inventory and takes no orders. Once you cross into the area of online commerce, you will have special needs. The following are just a few things a professional design company can do for you:
Shopping cart integration
A shopping cart is the heart of what separates an eCommerce site from a regular website, but it is not easy to integrate this function with a regular website, especially one that you may have created yourself. A professional will build a website with a shopping cart fully integrated into your website. Your customers will be able to add items to their cart and place their orders with all of the calculations done for them, including sales tax and shipping charges. Customer addresses will be easy to enter and integrate with a shipping function, so you can print out address labels and packing slips and even pay for your postage online with your shipping carrier. Inventory is automatically adjusted after each order. All the functions of a shopping cart will be integrated without any glitches
Integrating payment options
Attaching several payment processing functions to a website is not easily done, and you'll want to offer as many payment options as possible. This includes all of the popular credit and debit cards, but also should include the most popular payment aggregators. Paypal and Amazon Payments are two popular examples of these types of payment methods. Offering a variety of payment options will reduce the chance of customers abandoning their shopping carts.
Your website will be designed with marketing in mind
Search engine optimization will be a part of your eCommerce design from the ground up. You will have the option of adding a blog that is either a part of your website or separate, but with a strong association. You can even have a forum designed into your site. Email marketing can be addressed by programming the capability to record customers' emails, so you can have a list to market to. In addition, you can have a list that visitors to your site can opt into, even though they did not order anything. Having these and other built-in marketing tools can help you grow your company from the start.
Even if you have already designed a web page in the past, you should understand that an eCommerce site is much different. Having eCommerce website design services help you with your site from the bottom up is a great advantage to a new business.
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