5 Steps to E-Commerce
1.) First you need to register a domain
name. Try to pick a domain name that has your product
line in the title. That will help with the search engines.
Also, get any misspells of your domain name. If you don't
your competition will. And you will loose business when
potential customers go to the wrong site by accident!
2.) Sign up for hosting with a company
that has a shopping cart and SSL. A shopping cart program
is what handles your customers shopping and checkout.
It is software that will add up the order, add tax, shipping,
email invoices, etc. Most companies that offer ecommerce
plans, offer shopping cart programs. SSL is secure processing
and what it does is allow your customers to input their
credit cards securely. Most Ecommerce hosting companies
will allow you to use theirs without you paying to get
your own. But, it does look more professional if you get
your own secure certificate in time, since the URL will
only show your company name in it.
3.) Get a Merchant Account & a Gateway
or sign up with Paypal . If you want to get orders, you
must take credit cards. People just don't want to take
the time to pay by mailing in a check anymore. They want
the convenience of paying by credit card. It's fast and
easy. Having a merchant account allows you to take credit
cards, the gateway will work with your merchant account
to check the persons balance, check for fraud etc. and
if all looks okay, put the money into your merchant account.
All within about 5 seconds. If you want to start out slowly
you can sign up as a merchant with Paypal and use their
merchant account and gateway. It costs a little more per
sale, but you don't have to pay anything if you don't
sell anything which is nice when you are starting out.
Be sure that the shopping cart you choose works with the
gateway you choose or with Paypal. Hint - It's usually
cheaper to go with a merchant account/gateway combination
than to go with a merchant account company and then with
a gateway company separately. If they are bundled they
are usually cheaper.
4.) Design Your Website. You can either
design your own site using popular software like FrontPage,
Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive etc. Or you can hire a website
designer. Then just link your site to your shopping cart
using links such as: 'Add to Cart', 'Buy Now' or 'Shop
Online'. The shopping cart can usually handle pictures
of all your products so you don't need to put them on
your website if you don't want to. One hint - Even if
you do hire a web designer to design your site, you might
want to learn how to make small changes on your site.
Try learning FrontPage and practice pulling up your site
and editing it before you pay your designer so that he/she
will help you get started. Here is one place to go to
have designers bid on designing your website: www.elance.com.
The designers come from all over the world so the prices
are very competitive.
5.) Promote Your Site. You could get
a masters degree in how to promote a website. So there
is a lot to learn about promoting. You might want to start
reading information on sites that specialize in this.
Just be sure and edit your site before you submit it to
the search engines by changing your keywords, title and
description. Here is one site you can go to for a lot
of information on promoting your site: www.searchenginewatch.com.
If you want to hit the ground running, submit to the top
search engines and try www.overture.com which is a pay
per click that will put your site at the top of Yahoo!,
Google, Alta Vista, etc.
