Developing an eCommerce website or web application is a priority among the majority of business owners, retailers, entrepreneurs, service providers and commercial enterprises in order to transform the competitive advantages of online shopping into a long term consistent revenue source through a professional and stunning eCommerce website or web application.
eCommerce websites offer customers to discover, compare and purchase desired products or services online conveniently from anywhere and anytime in few minutes with few clicks using their smartphones, tablets, and PCs and as per the time demand which make the decision to invest time, efforts & money in eCommerce website development process a rational decision regarding increasing your business growth with more sales and higher revenues.
In addition to the excellent online shopping experience, there are many other competitive benefits offered by eCommerce websites that include but are not limited to:
- Increase your business reach through targeting right audience in different local & international markets
- Attract more potential customers & increase the sales volume
- Reduce physical store operational and marketing costs
- Track and analyze consumers behavior to customize your products & marketing strategies
- Generate more upselling & cross-selling opportunities with remarketing
Well, today, we are here with a perfect eCommerce website development guild in which you will know about type of eCommerce websites and how to develop successful eCommerce website.
Types of eCommerce Websites
Before discussing the designing and development process of an eCommerce website, we discuss first the types of eCommerce websites to define the most suitable type for your business needs and goals.
- B2B (Business-to-Business) eCommerce Websites: Enterprises eCommerce platforms to promote products and services to other businesses while increasing their reach and targeting international markets.
- B2C (Business-to-Customer) eCommerce Websites: eCommerce websites dedicate to display and promote products to final consumers like clothes, electronic products, furniture, grocery products, gift items etc.
- C2C (Customer-to-Customer) eCommerce Websites: Third-party platforms like eBay enable regular individuals and retailers to promote and sell their products (courses, ebooks etc.) online to final consumers.
- C2B (Customer-to-Business): C2B websites dedicate to freelancers to sell their services to small, mid and large businesses.
- Price Comparison (Aggregator) Websites: A Vertical search engine used by online shoppers to filter and compare the products based on features, price, reviews and another basis is the Price Aggregator websites. They compare the prices and purchase the best deal from the vendors websites.
- Auction/Bidding eCommerce Websites: It is a type of niche category of eCommerce websites where several products are enlisted for auction and the user can share their online bid in order to procure the product.
Things to be considered before developing an eCommerce Web Solution
From the conceptualization of your plan to reality for an eCommerce website development, there are many aspects that need to be considered. A major important aspects that require an entrepreneur’s attention are discussed below.
- Conduct Deep Research of Your Business Industry: The first step to consider in the making of the eCommerce website development is to hold a in-depth knowledge of your business, audience, target locations and competitors.
- Analyze Competitor Websites: After research on your business competitors, need to analyze their online business and effective working segments through browsing the web indexes, such as Google, Bing and yahoo. These analyses are going to assist you in finalising the major features for your eCommerce website or web application to leave your competitors behind and give them neck to neck competition.
- Budget for Designing & Development: Budget plays a vital role in deciding the design and feature of the website. The following points are main factor to calculate your website development pricing.
- Developer type (independent freelancer, in-house team, remote software development company)
- Developer rates (may change depending on location, experience, portfolio and so forth)
- Website features/functionality
- Third-party APIs pricing
- Cost of website domain, hosting and SSL
- eCommerce Website Development Platforms: Picking up the right eCommere business platform is key for your business success. Fortunately, you can discover a lot of web-based eCommerce platforms out there. You simply need to make sure which one is most appropriate for your necessities. As of now some of the popular eCommerce website development platforms are:
- Shopify
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
- Magento
- OpenCart
- Website Security: In the eCommerce marketplace, security plays an import role in making the website bug-free and secure, Various hackers, fraudsters target the eCommerce marketplace to capture the customer’s details, product details, price information and financial details related to banking and debit or credit cards. So, data security should be offered a top priority and for that, it needs to implement various techniques on the website to maintain comprehensive security.
- Make sure website obtains SSL & PCI standards.
- In order to eliminate website scrapping and fraudulent activities, the real-time bot should be implemented.
- Enhance the network security using web application firewall
- Have a right CRM system where customers data can be kept secured.
- Guide the customer to set a strong account password.
Advanced Features of an eCommerce Website
- Social Login-Signup: This element permits the clients to join the website using social media like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Linkedin etc.
- Chatbot for customer support: Using chatbots, it becomes possible to speak directly to the customer support bot for round-the-clock assistance for the inquiries related to order, products and payments.
- Multiple payment gateways: By implementing multiple payment gateway options offers an easy payment platform to customers, which they need the most for an easy shopping experience.
- Multilingual & currency: If targeting the global market then integration of multiple language and currency converter APIs are required to enhance the user experience and better sales.
- Shipment tracking: Shipment tracking is an import element of eCommerce business. Service providers work rigorously to keep up the shipment process, under varied circumstances. The explanation behind attempting to accomplish effective in shipping is to keep up and enhance consumer satisfaction throughout order fulfilment process.
- Role-based dashboard: Role-based dashboard handle custom dashboard where you can assign the access depending on the employee role.
- Behaviour Tracking: Integration of analytics help you to analyze and understand the visitors interest on any particular product or services listed on website.
- Advance Analytics: Progress analytics (reports, pie diagrams, graphs) that can be visible to administrator, which includes insights related to the number of orders received, shipment details, delivery information, number of customers, wholesalers & retailers etc.
- Marketing Tools: Administrator can manage the complete marketing activities (campaign monitoring, ad manager, SMS, Email etc.) and export across reports to enhance the sales and marketing strategies.
- Logistics management: A supply chain management component is employed to attain the customer needs all through planning. Control and implementation of the productive movement and the storage of relevant products, information and services from the source to destination. Although, it aids the companies to lower down the expenses and improve customer services.
- Warehouse management: A warehouse management system is an expert in helping the routine operations of warehouse where distinct warehouse management jobs are handled all through an web interface. This leads to an easy and efficient run of warehouse and also ensures minimal losses.
- Inventory management: Inventory management is important in-parallel to the expanding company especially to POS and more sales channels.
- Artificial Intelligence & AI-Powered eCommerce web application: AI feature and chatbots to make the clients understand, produce the new leads and offer an enhanced client experience. There are various techniques that can be used are:
- Smart customer-centric search such as voice search, image search
- AI automates the process of description writing for the products
- Advance strategies where user behaviour can be tracked
- According to the users search related product recommendations
- AI customer service solutions for pre-sale and post-sale
- AI-powered chatbots enhance user experience during browsing for product or services
In-house Development Team Vs Outsourcing Development Vs Independent Freelancer
- In-house team: Hire own software development team to build the eCommerce website or web application. If offers various pros and cons:
Pros
- Superior understanding of the corporate culture and business.
- Complete devotion to project completion
- No social and culture difference
- Face to face discussion can be made easy
Cons
- Huge cost investment
- Lack of infrastructure and skills
- Outsourcing development: Hire a experienced remote software development company. It’s also come up with various pros and cons.
Pros
- Saving cost
- Quality control
- Skilled programmers
- Reduce operation & infrastructure cost
- Provide flexibility in the business process
Cons
- Lack of control
- Culture and time difference
- Independent Freelancer: Hire a independent response or freelance for development of your eCommerce platform. Major pros and cons are listed below:
Pros
- Cheaper to hire
Corns
- Lack of Supervision
- Unpredictable quality of work
- Project slippage during sickness
- Less secure
- Lack of ability to meet the stunning user experience
- Lack ability to train a freelancer
Development steps for eCommerce Website
Once you have finalized features for designing and development of your eCommerce website or web application, the next step is to start the eCommerce website development process. The essential steps of the eCommerce website development process are:
1. Choose the best suitable eCommerce solutions
The first step in your eCommerce website development process is choosing the best suitable eCommerce platform to transform the website into a fully-functional online store with the required and desired features integrated efficiently.
2. Create a user-friendly eCommerce website design
Once you have decided which eCommerce platform are suitable for your eCommerce online store, the following phase of your eCommerce website development is creating professional user-friendly eCommerce website design to take great steps further towards owning a successful eCommerce business.
Your eCommerce website design will create a competitive benefits for your online store when you keep the user experience in mind to ease the website navigation experience through:
- Create a responsive mobile-friendly eCommerce website design with scalable content, images, elements & buttons on diverse devices
- Create a website pages with clear branding elements like official logo, colors schema, etc.
- Simplify your eCommerce website design by removing unnecessary items
- Use drop-down categorized navigations menu to ease access to product categories and subcategories
- Display your products with high-quality images or 360º panoramic images & videos
- Use a brief short description for each product
- Eliminate users distraction with avoiding display popups
3. Providing the best online shopping experience
The increasing competition among eCommerce businesses requires offering the greatest online shopping experience to avoid losing potential and current buyers to your competitors. The process of providing the top-notch online shopping experience can be done through your eCommerce website:
- Increase the online pages loading speed which is not more then 4 seconds
- Efficient products categorization (main categories – subcategories – products)
- Apply advanced search and products filtering options
- Display all details for each product (stock status – shipping cost & duration – professional product images – customers reviews & testimonials – related products)
- Use a “Thank You” page for confirming completed purchases
- Offer efficient multiple customer support options such as live chat / email
- Create an easy registering process and support guest checkouts
- Integration of multiple convenient secured online payment options
- Secure visitors personal information & financial transactions with SSL certificate encryption
- Support many languages and currency
- Ensure compatibility with different browsers
- Declare a clear return and exchange policy for products with a FAQ page
- Display icons for official social media accounts to offer more communication options
4. Testing & launching your Ecommerce Platform
After completion of development the major step of your eCommerce website development journey is testing all components and features to ensure launching an efficient professional online store including:
- Navigation experience (compatibility with browsers & mobile devices)
- Check-out process for online purchases (integration of online payment options)
- Security level of databases and financial transactions
- Functionality to track discount coupons
- Functionality integration of third party APIs
- Load and Stress testing to ensure web performance under a sudden high load
Once you’re satisfied with testing of your eCommerce website, you can start the launching phase to make your online store available and accessible for potential and current buyers to discover and buy available products or services.
Promote your Online eCommerce Store
The eCommerce website development process end after successfully launching your online store with the exception of future updates of your eCommerce website features. Only being an online store is not enough to expand your eCommerce business to the highest. Digital marketing is the key of success for your eCommerce business, so need to craft effective digital transformation strategy to boost your business and always be ahead from your completion.
Integration digital marketing solutions are the most suitable cost-effective choice for promoting your online store to generate more sales and revenues including:
- Customize an eCommerce SEO strategy for generating more free profitable traffic from search engines
- Pay-per-click ads for attracting more potential buyers within your budget limits
- Social media marketing ads on suitable channels to increase awareness and sales
- Email newsletters and promotional campaigns to promote new products related to the interests of targeted users
- Offer sales discounts and coupons for loyal customers
Creating a professional eCommerce website and launching digital transformation strategy are the main required steps to deliver consistent profits from your eCommerce business.
Evaluate your eCommerce business performance
Your eCommerce website require periodical evaluation and regular monitoring to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your online store for generating a consistently high return on your investment. Using tracking codes, traffic repots and customer behaviour will enable you to evaluate your eCommerce website performance efficiently using suitable metrics which are:
- Monthly traffic volume from search engines, social channels, referral websites, paid ads and returning visitors
- Conversion rate (completed purchases / traffic volume)
- Each product sales volume
- Each product category sales volume
- Average order value
- Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)
- Bounce rate
- Shopping cart abandonment rate
- Average session duration & time on each page
The mentioned metrics help in providing a clear & clean picture of your eCommerce business performance and which areas require improvement to ensure having a successful eCommerce website.
Conclusion
The journey of successful professional eCommerce website or web application development process starts with defining your business requirements and desired goals to achieve with your online store then cooperation with an trusted eCommerce solution provider in order to design, develop, launch, and promote a flawless online store that generates endless business opportunities and the highest return on your investment. Get in touch today to develop your professional eCommerce website and web application.