Seeing the current scenario and a myriad of websites in the internet, having a website that sets you apart from the rest is the need of the hour. And for this purpose, you can also take help from the professional services. Even though, it is quite possible to create a website with your own skills, but it is recommended to take help from a competent service provider in order to survive in the dynamic era of the World Wide Web. Only the services of a competent professional can turn your website from an ordinary one into a professional website, and moreover. It helps in gathering potential customers towards your websites and scoring above your competitors without any difficulty. An Ecommerce Website designer can make your wish come true.

You will get to know about several reasons that why you should get professional assistance. Read on to find more about it.

Only a professional website can analyze the business structure of an organization and deliver results according to the needs. With the growing flexibility, you can easily reap benefits out of the given situation. The match able solutions given by experts could be applied by the entrepreneurs with the help of the improvised technology in their firms.

Technical assistance is one of the most sought- after qualities by the businessmen, and many are vying to create a website that is user friendly as well as boasts of the strong technical advantage possessed by it. Only professional ecommerce web designers know how to develop a website that is preferred by the online audience because of its no- nonsense USP’s. If your website is not technically sound then forget about the dream of making it to the top position. Ecommerce website design rules the market now.

Creating an effective and efficient website is not a child’s play, and you need to have the professional expertise to develop what is in demand these days, and you cannot achieve this forte in the absence of professional services. Only a competent service provider will deliver you the expected results on time thus saving your money and precious time. Specialists are perfect if you want to design your website and the fee charged is also nominal. There is a growing need of ecommerce web development.

Start up organizations is not aware of the benefits associated with the integrated marketing concept that is why they get lost in the crowd. In such cases, it is essential to take help from the professional as to garner your sales and learn marketing techniques. This way you would be able to achieve what was impossible in the past, and will gain loyal customer ship. Now, you must have understood why you should go for professional help in order to get acquainted with the knowledge of marking tools and techniques.

Only a professional can make you aware of the current trends and the statistics of the competitors.

Hire a professional and enjoy the windfall gains.

If you believe in providing services of supreme quality to your customers, then Ecommerce website design should be your ultimate choice. The revolutionary changes in technology have made the designing aspect of ecommerce website pretty easy and free from any difficulties. If you believe in the magic of Ecommerce website design then no can stop you from turning your dream into reality and having a good loyal customer ship. With the help of Ecommerce webs designers, you can earn good profits too. Such websites are made in a way so the customer feels the need to buy the products and services displayed on the site; they are very different from the regular web design and are quite appealing.

Such sorts of websites are designed in a way so that the company is able to turn its prospective customers into loyal and repeat customers. The website should have such an enchanting effect on the customer that they should be able to feel the environment of a real time physical shop. The physical features must be appealing to the eyes and needless to say, the website should have easy navigation. Navigation aspect allows the user to get through the pages easily and find what he or she is looking for; its layout should not confuse the user. A website with a confusing layout repels the users.

The designing of website should be done by a qualified and skilled Ecommerce website designer. To hire one, look for the useful information provided online. You will get to know about a number of good Ecommerce website designers in your town. Ecommerce web development is very crucial for the growth of your business. With the growing competition, you have to have an edge over your competitors and Ecommerce website design is there to help you.

Services and product information that is displayed on your website must have sufficient information because in an online market the buyer is not physically present to asses the quality of the products, so you must provide them with useful information so that they like your product or service and end up buying them. But the catch is it is not easy to do.

Once the prospective customer is convinced that he likes the product and wants to buy it then transfer of product and financial transaction takes place. It is your duty to convince the buyer that the product which is going to be delivered soon at his doorstep will be of good quality just like it was shown on the website. There will be no compromise in its quality.

The buyer is skeptical about making financial transaction with any new company so you have to assure them that their personal information won’t be leaked and they are completely safe. The crucial information contains the username and password of the medium which is used for sending money for the product or service obtained by the customer.

Market strategy of many firms include money back guarantee in case the customer is not satisfied with the service. It is a good method to attract customers to your website.

Zen Cart is an open source store management system based on PHP and MySQL. It is freely available to the public for use. It has come out as a branch of the OSCommerce software as a separate project. The main differences between the two pertained to the development and incorporation of additional features like the gifts certificate/voucher modules in it and in the architectural changes in the layout of the module. The architectural changes were, in the earlier times, essentially the template based design modules. But, that has now given way to the CSS based design modules.

A Zen Cart developer can make use of the various features of Zen Cart to develop an ecommerce website for your online sale-purchase transactions. Some of these features include the multiple language support, sales and discounts features, local taxes incorporation, multiple shipping and payment options and others. While it gives an easy way out to the Zen Cart programmer to prevent detailed coding for the functionalities again and again, it does require skillful customization using its modules. The use of Zen Cart and other similar ecommerce carts has facilitated the quick designing process of the websites. You can now have your online store ready in a few days time. The greatest advantage of these software lies in the fact that the owner of the website can himself carry out the changes required like the replacement of the product photos, incorporating the discounts, setting up newsletters and many others. All in all, the administrator can do everything that can be done on the online store.

Yet another advantage of the Zen Cart ecommerce solution is that it facilitates the creation of the SEO friendly site. With internet marketing catching fever and every one clamouring hard to gain the maximum visibility on the most visited internet resources, notably the search engines, it would not pay if the SEO process is ignored by the Zen Cart developer. All the features of a website which make it SEO friendly shall be present in the ecommerce site as well. Some of these features are:

• Easy navigation: The coding of the Zen Cart is based on PHP and MySql and this makes it suitable for SEO since there is no problem of navigation of the pages. The time taken for loading of the site is lesser.

• Static URLs: It is possible to create the static URLs that are SEO friendly by using the Zen Cart third party as well as built in modules and add-ons. There are a number of software available for this. Or, even a seasoned Zen Cart programmer can do the needful in no big time. Therefore, it goes to meet one of the most perceivable criteria for doing the SEO.

• It allows you to have the meta tags for SEO for every page, product or category page. Even the image alt tags can be incorporated.

So, with all these essential SEO friendly features, it becomes important facilitators of marketing as well as sales processes.

Conducting sales through a website is no easy task. Surveys reveal that 3/4^th of the e-commerce endeavors end in a fiasco as the management did not realize the tasks needed to conduct the business online. With unrealistic expectations of profit and no strategy firmly in place, e-commerce is bound to fail. After extensive research however, experts have come up with some kind of framework and guidelines based on which an e-commerce hub can survive. Here’s a brief synopsis of the seven fundamental guidelines or pillars of an e-commerce site. 

Marketing Strategies — Online

Although online marketing has been in the online market for more than a decade, many e-commerce webmasters don’t realize its importance. The fact that sites should make their presence in the search engines, create brand awareness, and showcase their products to attract traffic is not new. 

One of the most important survival tactics by e-commerce site is to promote their Internet marketing strategies by making their site optimized with keywords, creating search engine spider friendly website design, and ensure products are categorized well for all to find it through search engine result pages. 

Initiating Orders — Online

Can a user order a product online? Theoretically its all perfect in most e-commerce site, however the scenario changes in the practical world. This is what most users say while transacting an online shopping mall or a shopping guide. The second pillar to success on any e-commerce site is to ensure that the ordering process is easy and through online means. 

Conducting Sales – Online

Conducting sales is the next pillar of success for any online business site. A website design should be created in such a way so that financial transaction and shipping is completed without any hassle and that the customer should not be compelled to follow up through phone or mail. 

An online payment option – whether through online payment website, such as Paypal – or credit card payment, should be hassle free. When asking for personal information from the client for identity verification, ensure the information does not leak. 

Transaction of Goods and Money — Online

The fourth pillar of success is to complete the entire process of shipment with ease and on time. Whether tangible products or information-related ones, ensure that the customers gets the value for his money. 

Boost Interest — Online

Advertising one’s skills through various Internet marketing techniques or simply showcasing one’s abilities through articles, virtual tours is the next pillar of success for e-commerce site. 

Direct Marketing — Online

Direct marketing works wonders for any sites conducting business through online means. The one-on-one marketing helps to be more specific, personal, and sincere in the effort to increase sales prospects. 

Initiating Support System — Online

Last but not the least, is the online support system. Having a round-the-clock customer cell to cater to all issues related to the e-commerce business is one of the best pillars of success for a site. 

So, get, set, and go with your online endeavor by keeping in mind these salient pillars of success.

It seems quite ambitious if you were to plan an e-commerce site which would be equal to Amazon.com or e-Bay.com. E-commerce website does not mean you have to rope in all Internet users but you need to choose the right technique to rope in customers whom you can address to and cater to their needs.

E-commerce Website

E-commerce is a website which primarily conducts a business through online means. From start, that is choosing products in a site, to finish, that is payment for the products, everything should be done online. The e-commerce company then sends the shipment within a stipulated time.

E-commerce Solution

Today, e-commerce website has greatly evolved from its nascent stage few years ago. Both big and small online businesses use a website to communicate with the potential customers. With no middlemen involved in the trade, the profit is higher, security is better, business and interaction is transparent.

Components of E-commerce Solution

An E-commerce solution would primarily have a website with an ability to allow financial transaction to take place. For instance, it should ideally display products for sale in specific categories, provide shopping carts for the customer to store the products he wants to buy, and finally, have a counter or payment option where financial transaction can take place. In the web, credit card credentials are used for payment.

E-commerce Solutions for Big Businesses

Solutions for big businesses have sophisticated and high-end categorization of the products, shopping carts, payment options, security, etc. Care is taken to accommodate the traffic influx at any given time. The punctual in delivery of the products, the promptness of answering customer needs is something which is a must for any big or small business. For big businesses, this endeavor is much more laborious due to the volume.

E-commerce Solutions for the Small Businesses

Solutions for small business are quite similar as the big ones with common elements, such as shopping cart, payment mode, etc. But, the difference lies in the size of the solution and how much traffic flow it can withstand.

As small businesses don’t need sturdy elements, they can do with e-commerce templates that are readily available in the Internet. Some are even free! You can first start on a template and then enhance it or optimize it. Why start from the scratch and increase your expenditure?

Lastly

Don’t forget to optimize the e-commerce website you’ve created from an E-commerce solution. When optimized, the traffic flow and Click-per-Rate also increases considerably. Finding a true solution that helps you in your online business efforts is laborious. However, there are many e-commerce solutions today that offer custom-made, bug-free, and easy to set up websites. These sites are also aligned with affiliate programs and powerful marketing tools.

Once you’ve launched your eCommerce web site, you’ll need to show it off to the online world. Whether you’re paying someone to submit your site to all the major and minor search engines and directories, it’s still up to you to continually advertise your eCommerce site in order to keep attracting business.

Many online business owners will tell you that within six to nine months of your launch date you’ll start seeing increased orders for your products. However here are 8 things you can do to lure people to your site now!

1.Advertise on http://www.Craigslist.org . This entry will only last for 10 days and you must submit to one city and category at a time. You can include photos and/or advanced HTML in your ad.

2.Write a press release and send out for free to the following sites: http://www.prweb.com [this one has been around for several years]; http://www.prfree.com and http://www.openpress.com Paid submissions will get you more views, quicker listings in the search engines, and the ability to post photos and keep track of your statistics.

3.Submit your site[s] to http://www.isedb.com/html/Web_Directories [You’ll discover loads of directories here, from the highly specialized to the mainstream. Many of the sites have ratings; indicate whether they’re accepting new submissions, and if there’s a fee for submitting].

4.Search engine positioning. When advertising your eCommerce site, always have the following information on hand: A. Your Web site title. This should be approximately 7-12 words. B. Description. Have 3 different descriptions of varying lengths. 15 words, 25 words, 100 words. Have them summarize the essence of your site. C. Keywords. 10 – 50 of your most important keywords arranged in order of importance. Again, some online directories will allow you to contribute more keywords than others.

5.Write articles about your products/service. Be an online expert. What makes your site so unique from the thousands of others in your chosen category? Is it your customized service? Your low prices? Your high quality? Don’t over promote your product, but concentrate on what will help others. It’s highly recommended you include at least two or three testimonials.

6.Exchange links with other sites that have quality information and are related to your field in some way. For example, I sell a lot of soap so I link with mostly gift basket, crafting and candle sites.

7.Free classifieds. These can sometimes get you listed in the search engines, but don’t expect too much response from them.

8.Offer a freebie. For example, if you have an eBook for sale, you won’t give the entire book away, but having a chapter or two online will increase interest – and sales. If you make or sell a product, offer a free sample with a paid order. Or free shipping on sales over a certain amount.

Follow one or more of these helpful tips and watch your online business bloom!

Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. Some Internet retailers are even beating out their offline counterparts. So what does this mean to you? It’s important that you are taking full advantage of your web site to get your share of the billions of dollars spent online every year. In this article we are going to cover 7 tips that you can put into practice immediately to increase your sales and revenue with your ecommerce web site.

1: Introduction
Make sure to have a brief introduction on the homepage of your web site. Your introduction should be concise and clearly identify the benefits of your visitors shopping at your site.

2: Navigation
Make sure that your site has clear and easy navigation, such as a visible search box on the top part of your web site, clear categories to browse through, a FAQ page that clearly explains your shipping and return policy, and etc.

3: Gift Certificates
People love getting gifts at certain times of the year, so make sure that you have gift certificates that your visitors can purchase right on your web site.

4: Customer Loyalty
Instead of just focusing on getting new customers why not take advantage of repeat business? Why not give your customers an incentive to come back and do business with you again? You can easily do this by offering coupons and special discounts to ones who have already purchased something from you. This is a lot easier than acquiring new customers since they already know you and feel comfortable shopping at your site. You can also add more value to your customers by adding live customer support to your site.

5: Special Offers
Make sure to have a section on the top part of your home page devoted to featuring your current special offers and sales items. In fact if you happen to have a lot of special offers you can just feature the most popular ones and then make a separate web page that shows all of your sales items.

6: Shopping Carts
People want the checkout process to go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so make sure that your visitors are always just one click away to checkout. Try to reduce the checkout process to as few steps as possible. Make sure to offer multiple payment options such as credit cards, Paypal, online checks, mail orders, and such. When you no longer have a product in stock make sure to either remove it from your site or clearly mark it as “out of stock”. There is nothing more irritating for a customer to go through the whole checkout process only to find out that you no longer carry the item they ordered.

7: Affiliate Program
Do you have your own affiliate program? The most successful web sites have one and you should too. By starting your own affiliate program you will develop an increasing online sales force where you only pay them when a sale is made. There is really no risk and it is one of the best low cost effective advertising methods that you can use.

If you put these tips into practice you will notice a drastic increase in your sales and web site revenue.

So you want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very large group. First off, let’s be clear that there are a lot of ways to do business on the internet – and a lot of ways to both make and lose money.

This article is going to assume that you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I’m not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We’re a bit beyond those basics. The basics here have to do with factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success an eCommerce web site experiences.

First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn’t make for a high value site. Sure you can make some money. Once. And you’ll likely have a high refund rate. Essentially you’d be taking advantage of the inexperience of your customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. Not a good path to a long-term business with steady repeat customers.

Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales — a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you’ve created in your buyers. Hyped junk won’t do it.

Next, you’ve got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat.

If you do use call-in or live chat, it’s imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and BE customer friendly. This can be a difficult job if you outsource. The less expensive out-source alternatives can be a bad investment. You’ll need to check very carefully and be certain the operators do actually speak and understand the primary languages(s) of your targeted customer group. You’ll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts. You should also collect customer evaluations of these services – separately, and carefully monitor your results to be sure you are getting a decent return on the investment.

You need to have an attractive website. Some can do well with an ugly site, but, in that case, you need to really understand what you’re doing and why it might work. The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced and very few individuals truly have the grasp of marketing and customer psychology that can lead to a successful “ugly” site.

To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use – colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn’t mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option.

Wherever you can, provide incentives for customers to buy and to return. The return factor is a critical piece of a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. They have at least some faith in you, enough to have purchased. Do your utmost to never damage that faith and treat them with the care they deserve.

Your website is your tool for showing the online community an image of your Drop Ship retail business. Whether or not your business succeeds depends heavily on your website. If your website design is user-friendly, more visitors will purchase your products or subscribe to your newsletter. This will ensure that you are not wasting the time and money you spent attracting visitors to your website. It does not pay to drive large amounts of traffic to your website and have 99% of them leave due to poor content and navigation.

When designing your website, it is important that you switch from your own profit-oriented perspective to the prospective customers’ perspective. First place yourself in your customers’ shoes. After which, you should take some time to sit down and plan how your website should look like.

Below I will describe the factors that contribute to a successful sales-optimized website for a Drop Ship business.

1) The critical components of your homepage.

- Your title tag. It should describe your website effectively and concisely. For search engine optimization purposes, it is necessary to include your main keywords in your title, without it being unnecessarily long. For example, a good title would be ‘Renaissance Oil Paintings ½ Abstract Oil Paintings’.

- Your headline. Being one of the first few elements of your homepage that captures the attention of the visitor, it should clearly and concisely state what benefit your website can offer to the visitor. For example, your headline can tell your visitors how to earn extra income, how to lead a healthier lifestyle or how to save them time or money. In short, it should offer a solution to their problems, or address their needs. The headline should be placed strategically right at the top center of the page. You can also use the italics or bold functions to draw attention to your headline.

Internet surfers are not known for their patience. That is why it is crucial to capture their attention during the first few seconds of their stay at your website. Your headline plays the most important role, as it is usually the first thing that visitors see. Research has shown that you have about ten seconds to fully capture the attention of the visitors and compel them to read on, before they leave your site.

- Your content body. In your main body of your homepage, you have to describe in further detail the benefits your website or your products can offer to your visitors. Note that you provide the benefits, and not the features of the products you are selling. This is the basis of effective marketing: you tell the customers what is in it for them. You must also give strong directions to action in your content body and tell them the steps they need to take in order to benefit most from your website. For example, you can include links like ‘Click here now to discover why our oil paintings are among the best in Europe’, or ‘Sign up for our free newsletter now to get the latest tips and guides on good gardening practices.’ Note that you have to be concise in your content body so that you can include the most attractive benefits near the top of the homepage, without the visitor having to scroll down.

- Your opt-in offer. Ask for your visitors’ names and email addresses in your opt-in offer box. Email marketing is central to the success of your Drop Ship business. First-time visitors who leave your website without buying anything have a chance of signing up for your free newsletter. This allows you to keep in contact with them and send them promotions in future, and your effort and money in attracting them to your website would not be wasted. This feature should be placed somewhere near the top left or top right of your homepage because of its importance.

2) Professional look/atmosphere. Your website must not be full of graphics, banners or flashing advertisements. These only serve to distract your visitors from your main product offers. You should avoid flash animation as well. When formatting your text, use only a single type of font like Times New Roman, and two different colors at most. Page backgrounds should preferably be white or plain, and not be patterned or fanciful.

Another important factor to keep in mind is to minimize the time that your webpage takes to load. Since visitors are normally very impatient, they are likely to leave if a page is slow to load, hence the need to exclude large graphics or animation which slow down your loading speed.

3) Good content. Most online retailers sell products in a niche they have expertise in or which they are passionate about. For visitors to be convinced of your authority in the niche, you need to establish yourself as an expert in that area by providing useful, reliable content. Customers tend to trust retailers with strong background knowledge as they can recommend the best products for the customers’ needs, or answer any queries well. Fly-by-night businesses, on the other hand, are just out to make money, and normally do not have the necessary expertise to earn the trust of customers. It is thus critical that you make a consistent effort to update your website regularly with the latest tips, resources or articles to serve your visitors well. At least even if visitors do not buy from your website on their first visit, they would continuously return to your website for useful information. After a period of time, when you have earned their trust, they would feel more compelled to buy your products. This form of marketing, which develops an online community, is a very cost-effective method as it costs next to nothing to supply the necessary information.

4) Good navigation. This is another strong determinant of the success of your website. For a website to look ‘professional’, it has to be well organized into categories, and the pages must be linked to each other and to the homepage. Your navigation bars must be placed consistently at the same area on every page of your website. Navigation bars are most commonly placed on the left hand side of the page or at the top of the page. If you have numerous different categories on your navigation, it makes sense to place them on the left of the page. However, if you have only about five to seven options, you can place your navigation bars at the top of the page.

Use text links for your webpages on your navigation bars instead of graphic links. One factor that search engines like Google use to determine the relevance of your webpages is by the inclusion of keywords in the text links to that page.

It is also crucial that you name your navigation accurately and descriptively. Visitors would instantly know which link to click on to find what they want. If your website is cluttered with many obscure links, visitors would feel lost and leave your site immediately.

Organize your content well so that your visitors can navigate your site easily. They should be able to find what they want with the least number of clicks possible. Research has shown that for any extra click that visitors have to take to reach their goal, the number of visitors leaving your site can reach as high as 50%!

When deciding what to include in your navigation bar, first place yourself in your customers’ shoes. Think about what they would be most interested in when they visit your site, and place these links near the top of the page. Other links, which are secondary in importance for the visitor should be placed nearer the bottom of the page.

5) The standard pages. Like every other online business, your Drop Ship business website should also include some important pages that serve the customer.

- Testimonials. This page is considered as a ‘must-have’ for many online businesses. When you display the testimonials of other customers on your website, your credibility is established. Testimonials are like votes or ratings for your business that shows the real value of what you offer. The better the comments from customers, the better your website would appear to prospective customers. You can choose to place a separate testimonials page, or you can select a few of the best testimonials and place them on your homepage.

- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). After you have described your benefits in detail, visitors would still have several queries about your products. It is thus useful to create an FAQ page to write down the answers to what your customers are most likely to ask. When visitors have questions, they can simply visit your FAQ page, instead of sending you their queries by email. This saves you a lot of trouble for answering individual emails. Remember that most customers are not willing to make purchases when their doubts are still unanswered.

- Contact Us. Having this page boosts your reliability as a business. Remember to include your email address, mailing address and telephone numbers on this page.

- About Us. Describe what your team and your business aims to do.

- Privacy Policy. Customers value their privacy highly on the internet. When they submit their personal information like email address or mailing address on your website, fears about privacy may arise. You thus need to include a privacy policy to reassure your customers that their personal information will not be abused or given to any other third party. Remember to place links to your privacy policy on your order pages and also your opt-in offers.

eCommerce web design is a lot more than just putting your company brochure on the net or adding an internet shopping cart to your existing product catalog. There are some fundamental differences between doing business online and doing business the traditional way. Before you design your business web site, you must know what specific goals you desire to achieve with your business web site, determine how best to meet your goals based on your budget, and then determine what software and services you will use to design your e-commerce web site.

Web Site Business Objectives

A small business web site can do many things. This can include:

- Generate Leads. Pre-sell your business services and products to generate telephone, e-mail, or online form leads from customers.

- Generate Sales Quotes. Solicit or generate automated quotes that in turn generates a customer sale or lead.

- Generate Advertising Revenue. Display online content and free services with affiliate or ad network advertisements that generates advertising revenue from your merchant partners.

- Provide A StoreFront. Host online catalog that fully automates the customer purchase and communications process.

- Generate Customer Traffic. Generate customer traffic from search engines and business directories to pre-sell your product or service. Traffic is then re-directed to you main web site or product web pages.

Your e-Commerce web site design is greatly influenced by your specific web site objectives for your small business.

eCommerce Web Site Design Fundamentals

A web site is a lot more or even a lot less than a traditional store. There are more considerations with ecommerce web site design versus a traditional store. Web design considerations include:

Customer Friendly: Present a professional image, offer customer convenience, have good sales copy, and just make it easy for the customer to make the desired response (click, lead, sale).

Search Engine Friendly. For most online businesses, most customer traffic comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. If part of your e-Commerce web site design strategy is to generate search engine traffic, you will need search engine optimization expertise to succeed. Buy it or grow it.

Web Site Automation Tools. There are thousands of web site tools such as shopping carts, content management systems, e-mail auto-responders, payment processors, search engine optimization tools, online bulletin boards, traffic analyzers, and advertising management tools. Some of these tools are cheap and some are expensive. If you do not have the expertise to evaluate these products, it is probably best that you do not make any major investments in expensive web site tools. Wait until you become knowledgeable enough to evaluate web tools and add-ons for your business web site and that you have a specific need.

Costs. Costs, of course, are a key consideration for any e-Commerce web site design solution. You can usually purchase web site tools and services up-front or by subscription. Subscriptions can help you with your cash flow up-front. Usually you do not need to make any long-term commitments with subscription software or services. Subscriptions are good because as you become more knowledgeable of specific web site solutions you can add and drop web tools and services at will. Buying software up-front is good if you know that you will definitely use the software for a long time (1 to 3 years).

Web Site Design Options

eCommerce web site design options can range from doing it yourself with web design software such as Microsoft FrontPage or outsourcing the entire web site development to a web design company. For a business, a free site with a free web site builder is not the answer. A free solution will not generate the desire response from the customer, is not search engine friendly, and is limited in growth for web site add-ons. A free affiliate site can be OK for making a sale, but have another method to generate traffic to your affiliate site as search engines will rarely give high rankings to cloned affiliate sites. Here are some e-Commerce web site design options:

Do-It-Yourself. Buy web design software and do it yourself. Good option if: technically inclined, marketing skills, part-time web publisher, limited budget.

Do-It-Yourself Using Templates. Buy web site templates, web design software, and do it yourself. Good option if: technically inclined, marketing skills, supplement with low cost web design services.

Do-It-Yourself Using Web Site Builder Solution. Buy business web solution service. Good option if: not technically inclined, have marketing skills, and willing to make some investment. Do not waste your time with a site builder that just clones a snazzy web site. You will not get a web site that generates traffic or sales.

eCommerce Web Site Design Company or Consultant. Outsource your web design work. Good option if: not technically inclined, limited marketing skills, medium-to-large budget

As with any business there are risks. In evaluating an ecommerce web design solution it is best to know your objectives, have enough business knowledge to evaluate your web service suppliers as well as your business web tools, and maintain a positive cash flow.

The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly from your website. This model has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious drawback as well; very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being able to take the visitor’s money the second they want to spend it, however if it can be found on the first page of the search engines while your beautifully designed ecommerce site sits on page eight, the advantage is theirs. The vast majority of visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy from you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they don’t sell online but at least they’re able to deliver their message to an audience to begin with. So what can be done? The key is in the shopping cart you select.

SEO & Shopping Carts

The biggest problem with many SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions is that they are created after the initial product. Shopping cart systems such as Miva Merchant and OS Commerce are not designed with the primary goal of creating pages that will be well-received by the search engine spiders. Most shopping cart systems out there today are not in-and-of-themselves even spiderable and require 3rd party add-ons to facilitate even the lowest form of SEO-friendliness. The money you may have saved in choosing an inexpensive shopping cart may very well end up costing you your business in the long run, especially if you are using your shopping cart as the entire site, which we have seen may times in the past.

What Can Be Done?

There are essentially two solutions to this problem. The first is to create a front-end site separate from the shopping cart. What this will effectively do is create a number of pages that can be easily spidered (assuming that they’re well designed). The drawback to this course of action is that your website will forever be limited to the size of the front-end site. Which brings us to the second option: choose a search engine friendly shopping cart system.

Finding an SEO-friendly shopping cart system is far easier said than done. There are many factors that have to be taken into account including the spiderability of the pages themselves, the customization capacity of the individual pages, the ease of adding products and changing the pages down the road, etc. While I’ve worked with many shopping cart and ecommerce systems, to date there has been only one that has truly impressed me in that it is extremely simple to use, it allows for full customization of individual pages and the product pages get fully spidered to the point where they have PageRank assigned. A rarity in the shopping cart world.

The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly from your website. This model has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious drawback as well; very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being able to take the visitor’s money the second they want to spend it, however if it can be found on the first page of the search engines while your beautifully designed ecommerce site sits on page eight, the advantage is theirs. The vast majority of visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy from you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they don’t sell online but at least they’re able to deliver their message to an audience to begin with. So what can be done? The key is in the shopping cart you select.

SEO & Shopping Carts

The biggest problem with many SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions is that they are created after the initial product. Shopping cart systems such as Miva Merchant and OS Commerce are not designed with the primary goal of creating pages that will be well-received by the search engine spiders. Most shopping cart systems out there today are not in-and-of-themselves even spiderable and require 3rd party add-ons to facilitate even the lowest form of SEO-friendliness. The money you may have saved in choosing an inexpensive shopping cart may very well end up costing you your business in the long run, especially if you are using your shopping cart as the entire site, which we have seen may times in the past.

What Can Be Done?

There are essentially two solutions to this problem. The first is to create a front-end site separate from the shopping cart. What this will effectively do is create a number of pages that can be easily spidered (assuming that they’re well designed). The drawback to this course of action is that your website will forever be limited to the size of the front-end site. Which brings us to the second option: choose a search engine friendly shopping cart system.

Finding an SEO-friendly shopping cart system is far easier said than done. There are many factors that have to be taken into account including the spiderability of the pages themselves, the customization capacity of the individual pages, the ease of adding products and changing the pages down the road, etc. While I’ve worked with many shopping cart and ecommerce systems, to date there has been only one that has truly impressed me in that it is extremely simple to use, it allows for full customization of individual pages and the product pages get fully spidered to the point where they have PageRank assigned. A rarity in the shopping cart world.