If given a choice between buying stuff online and shopping the old-fashioned way, the modern customer will say they prefer — both. Shoppers today want some digital with their physical, and vice versa. Because the customer is always right, businesses can do little but comply. So consumers can have their cake, and they can eat it. And they can do all of that without ever having to think about how to develop an ecommerce website that lets them shop online.
But that’s what business owners and managers are for. Even small businesses and the people who own them need to take their online presence seriously and provide their customers with a decent online shopping experience. Lucky for them, it’s never been easier to develop an e-commerce website than it is now.
Do Not Go Blindly into Ecommerce Website Development
A good business owner will have plenty of things figured out before the actual development of the website starts. An online business is still a business, after all, and it needs to do all the things other businesses do:
- Register as a business entity;
- Decide on the line of products it will sell;
- Figure out a catchy name;
- Think about branding at least a little bit.
These things will matter a lot for the success of the ecommerce website. Businesses that don’t register as real businesses and sell stuff online are running the risk of potential legal troubles. Businesses that don’t focus on a certain type of product waste their energy trying to sell everything to everyone. So the work on the website needs to start before the actual development.
Ecommerce Website Development Key Choices
Two of the most basic decisions future ecommerce website owners need to make is the domain name they’ll use, and who is going to host the website.
The domain name doesn’t have to be the same as the name of the business. It doesn’t have to be the same as the name of the website. But it helps a business if it doesn’t make it too hard for the customers to remember it. So all the names should at the very least be easy to remember together.
The hosting is a serious decision. Good hosting providers can make it incredibly easy for small business owners to develop an e-commerce website. They can have dedicated WordPress hosting, for example, which makes WordPress website development easier. And the only thing that’s separating a WordPress website from an online store is a WooCommerce website plugin. For DIY store developers, this is probably the way to go.
DIY vs Hiring a Website Development Company
This is a good point for a small business owner to ask themselves a simple question: do I want to figure out how to develop an ecommerce website on my own? Or do I want someone else to take care of everything for me?
The truth of the matter is that it’s incredibly easy to find a professional ecommerce website development company. It might not be too hard to find a good one, even, regardless of the location. It’s as easy to find a great website development company in Sydney as it is to find one in Perth, or Brisbane.
And it’s also possible to find good service at a reasonable price. DIY like Wix or Squarespace can be cheaper, though, unless the resulting website ends up destroying the business. And that happens. Either way, this is the time to make the choice.
Website Development Basics
Business owners who decide to build their own WooCommerce website will probably want to stick with easy-to-use website builders. Still, they will need to sort out the product images, as well as the website copy. That work is neither easy nor irrelevant, and it can be time-consuming. Especially when compared to using ecommerce website development services for WordPress WooCommerce development.
Website builders make it easier by letting users choose things like themes and by making it easy to rearrange things on the visual side. The business owner will still need to set up a payment getaway if they expect to earn some money. But then again, the website builder can take care of that for them, too.
Choosing a shipping partner and beefing up security are the two final concerns. The shipping partners might wary from one region to another, and they might have different prices. Finding a reliable one might require some researching online, but it’s effort well spent.
For the security, the very basic thing business owners can do is install an SSL certificate. Not only will it make the website more secure, it will also keep the business in Google’s good grace. And that’s what all websites (and humans) should be striving to.
And that’s about it. Once they’ve done with these steps, business owners will have a functional ecommerce website they can use to sell their wares to people all across the globe. Of course, the real work starts when they have to figure out how to get those people from all across the globe to visit their store. But hey, they managed to build their own website. They’ll figure the rest out.