How to Build eCommerce Website?

Regardless of whether you’re a newcomer to eCommerce or a successful seller on Amazon, Airbnb, or TaskRabbit, you need your own website. It will help to stand out from the competitors and greatly cut commission costs: 70% of clients would like to purchase goods online or to book rooms in the hotel on the seller’s website and not on the marketplace because it’s cheaper this way. From our article, you will find out how to create your eCommerce website from scratch, how to make it successful, and how much it costs.

Step 1: choose your business model

At first, you need to define two things: how you will make a profit and how your website will stand out from the competitors. In most cases, answers to these questions depend on whether you are a manufacturer or an intermediary.

If you’re the manufacturer. The creation of an eCommerce website for this group of businessmen is a part of a marketing strategy: presence and sales online. This website is usually made for little money with a focus on design and not on a big number of features or some unique value offer. It’s generally believed that product or service is this unique offer itself. These projects make money on the sales of course: profit = revenue – expenses.

If you’re a commercial intermediary. These are b2b marketplaces, multi-vendor platforms, websites that make money on affiliate programs and other eCommerce projects. These websites seek to stand out from the competitors by means of the unique design and better user experience, that’s why such projects have a higher budget than the websites, which are created by manufacturers of products and services.

Websites-intermediaries make money in many ways:

• Commission. Platform charges interest rate of a small percentage or fixed sum of every trade transaction. Airbnb, Steem, Amazon make money like that.
• Payment for a post. The supplier pays for a publication of a post for sale of a product or service. Craigslist, Amazon, eBay, and Etsy make a profit in such a way.
• Paid features. The basic functionality of the website is free but the users have the opportunity to enable additional features (ad blocker, reservation, expert’s help, fast delivery, etc.) for an extra payment. Yelp, Amazon, Trulia, and IMDb website do this.
• Subscription. Monthly (or annual) payment for access to the platform (Netflix), package of additional services (Upwork), free products / content (Xbox Game Pass), or one particular product / service (WoW and Amazon Prime).
• Advertising. Paid announcements, banners, recommendations, mailing, a place at the top of the listing, or a place on the front page of the site and other types of advertising. Almost all websites on the Web use this way of monetization.

Step 2: decide on the website features

If there’s one product. For such websites, it’s recommended to create one-page landing pages (it’s easier for the visitor to make a decision to «scroll down», than to «click to another page of the website») with product description (use cases, advantages), call-to-action button and integration with payment gateway (not in every instance).

An example of such a project is the IWanttoDrawaCatForYou website. It’s created by Steve Gadlin. Steve used a sense of humor and drawing skills to create a simple website, where people can order funny cat drawings (for $9.95). Obviously, it was an experiment, nevertheless, as is often the case, people loved it and the experiment became a real business.

Another example — landing page of the Muzzle app for Mac (disables screen notifications). The page visitors see the animation that demonstrates spam of notifications and a call-to-action button, which can stop this spam.

If there are many products. To create eCommerce platforms, which sell many products or services, you need a catalog, flypages, search and filters, ratings and reviews, profiles for sellers and customers, and other features. Depending on product type, these features are implemented using completely different approaches. Specifically, clothing store need photos, videogames need videos, WordPress themes — demo-pages, real estate website — photos and a map, services — portfolio.

Examples of such websites are not far to seek — these are Amazon, Craigslist, Airbnb, Upwork, Coursera, and other multi vendor marketplaces. When it comes to small businesses, then the good example is the Helbak website, on which Malene Helbak sells her own ceramic and wooden products for kitchen and interior. Both her website and her products combine the simplicity of Scandinavian design and exquisite colors.

Another example — online store FreshFronks, where you can buy three types of organic nut milk. The website also looks simple, but the jump to the product page here is done by the click on the animated photo of the jar. Simple, beautiful, and interactive – this increases the conversion.

Step 3: choose an approach to the website creation

Ready-made solutions. There is a lot of various themes for WordPress and clone scripts on the Internet, which can help to create an eCommerce site of pretty decent quality in half an hour. Herewith in most cases, you don’t need skills of programming, web design or coding to use them. You just need to customize hosting and to activate the theme you liked if this is CMS WordPress. Each person can do this with the help of video instructions on YouTube.

The main disadvantage of ready-made solutions — banality: your output will be the website, which will be practically no different from other websites that use the same WordPress theme as you. Therefore, ready-made solutions are best used in the markets with little competition and / or to prove the concept.

eCommerce platforms. You can also find a lot of platforms customized to the launch of all kinds of eCommerce websites on the market. It’s usually an open-source free soft based on PHP or LAMP, which has all key features of online stores. Main examples: OpenCart, PrestaShop, Magento Community Edition, and Drupal Commerce framework. In fact, this is CMS for eCommerce projects, on the basis of which you can create and customize the website to yourself (unlike ready-made solutions that just need to be activated).

It’s more difficult to build websites with the help of eCommerce platforms because you need technical skills and an understanding of particular platform operating principles. Besides, these products are paid or use freemium-model: key features are free, but you need to pay for others (advanced ones). However, they allow creating more unique projects than ready-made solutions, so such an approach to launching eCommerce websites is very popular.

Solutions on the basis of SaaS or PaaS. Just like open-source platforms, there are cloud eCommerce solutions based on SaaS or PaaS on the market. Their only difference is that they’re almost always paid, closed and their back-end is on cloud servers. Moreover, you can’t edit the code of such solutions. You can use the graphical interface instead to customize your eCommerce website and some back-end elements. Examples: BigCommerce, Magento Enterprise, PrestaShop cloud, Shopify, Volusion.

The main advantages of SaaS and PaaS are that with their help you can launch the online store very quickly without worrying about technicalities (a supplier of PaaS or SaaS platforms with the assurance of back-end performance, updates, bug fixes, and other stuff). Therefore, you and your team can focus on sales and marketing. Cons of such approach: banality and subscription, which lowers the cost of entrance, but it’s unprofitable over the long run (it’s cheaper to create a site code from scratch).

Website builders. To create the eCommerce site you can also use online platforms that allow creating sites of proactively ready modules like LEGO kit. It’s quite easy to work with them and their functionality makes it possible to create a relatively unique site with all necessary features. Examples: Wix, Duda, uKit, Umi, Jimdo, Google Sites, Tilda, and others.

Pros of similar builders: simplicity and opportunity to create a pretty good site with needed features and relatively unique design. Cons: most features and modules won’t be available without the subscription. Besides, not every builder has modules to create eCommerce sites (integration of payment gateways, rating system and reviews, listings, flypages, etc.).

Your unique site. The most difficult, long, and expensive approach that people use if they want to create a site with a really unique design and features. They usually hire a company-developer as it makes the process simpler and cheaper. Moreover, if you hire a technical partner, you don’t need to think about looking for programmers, designers, QA, and other specialists.
People resort to this approach if they need a website for a very competitive market or if they want to become niche leaders quickly. Besides, the creation of site code from scratch provides full control over the process, retains the client’s copyrights for a software product, and allows saving in the long term.

Step 4: promote your internet business

SEO. The best way to attract people to your site is to get highly ranked in the search results of Google. You can do this with the help of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This implies the following:

• Research. Use Google Keyword Planner to find search queries that users use to search for products and services in your niche. You can also use SEMRush to analyze keywords that your direct competitors use. To analyze their backlinks (websites with links to the competitor’s site) use the service Moz Open Site Explorer.
• Website optimization. Use detected keywords to create headlines and relevant page descriptions, also including these key queries. However, don’t go overboard: if there will be too many keywords, the search engine will lower your site’s rating in the search results.
• Link creation. The presence of sites that have high-quality relevant links to your platform will also have a positive impact on its position in the search results. News, reviews, guides, recommendations, and other references to your beauty supply store on other sites are needed for it.

Content marketing. Create a blog to publish relevant and educational content, which target audience and professional community will be interested in. For example, if you sell good by shoe store, you can create texts like «Choosing sneakers guide» or «5 things, which will help to distinguish the real Adidas shoes from a fake».

A good example of content marketing — section Learn on the website of e-shop Blue Bottle Coffee. There are answers to frequently asked questions, reviews of coffee varieties, and instructions on how to make coffee. There is also a quiz «Coffee Match» that generates product recommendations to users according to their coffee habits and preferences.

Social media, SMM. According to the research of GlobalWebIndex, over half of users of social networks use them for various purposes including searching for goods and services and for choosing a particular brand. Thereat more than 70% of people say that if they have had a positive experience with a brand on social media, they are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and referrals.

What social networks you should get a page on:

• Facebook. A universal tool, which allows using various ways of promotion: texts, images, videos, events, announcements, paid advertisements. Thereat you can create a personal page or special business page with the action button and other tools: chatbots, flypages, restaurant menus, etc.
• Instagram. Online platform to demonstrate short videos, photos, and images, related to your business. Instagram is mostly used by young people (up to 25 years old), and it has significantly better engagement, activity, and response rates than Facebook.
• Pinterest. One more social network, customized to visual content (photos, images), which is the second traffic source for online stores among social networks.
• Twitter. Brands mostly use this network for instant feedback: preferences, problem solving, responses to the questions, etc.

Emailing. A simple, cheap, and herewith quite effective method to attract clients. Its only difficulty is a collection of a database of current and potential clients’ emails. You can buy this database (the price depends on the target audience) or collect it by yourself, attracting people with discounts, giveaways, special offers, etc. You can do email marketing with such email service providers as MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, or Campaign Monitor.

Step 5: implement the assessment of the effectiveness

After you create the eCommerce site, you’ll need tools to assess the results of your marketing activity and business activity. Due to them, you’ll be able to evaluate their effectiveness and to optimize them. The process and tools of assessment may vary according to your eCommerce platform and website settings, but as a rule, you can obtain almost all necessary indicators using the tools of Google Analytics.

Key performance indicators:

• Website traffic. It will tell you how many visitors per day you have (unique and repeat ones). How they find your site. What the dynamic is. Advertising influence. Other things.
• Conversion rate. The ratio of desired actions (sales) to the total number of your site visitors. A low conversion rate might point to a range of problems, for example to the fact that you attract the wrong target audience or that the site has a bad user experience.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA). The total cost of a campaign divided by conversions. It measures the efficiency of marketing and advertising efforts. It informs whether it’s appropriate to invest in the campaign or channel and helps to allocate budget respectively.
• Average order value (AOV). It provides insight into the clients’ behavior and expenses. For instance, low AOV may point out the fact that you mostly sell cheap goods (which isn’t always unprofitable), so you need to scale up the efforts on selling more expensive goods. Besides, it can also reveal that visitors purchase one product on the site and don’t go back on it, therefore you need to focus on cross-sales.

Legal nuances

In most countries, the creation of an eCommerce site requires business registration in relevant federal and / or municipal structures. For example, if you set up jewelry store in Delaware (USA), you need to:

• Submit a request for a business setting up (Delaware Division of Corporations).
• Register a registered agent (List of Delaware Registered Agents).
• Register a name (Delaware Courts).
• Register in IRS (for EIN / ITIN).
• Open a bank account and a trading account.

In addition, other permissions and licenses depending on your business and products may be required.
In the rest of the United States, the procedure might be slightly different. For example, when starting LLC in Arizona, you need to put an advertisement in local newspapers about the ecommerce startup set up. In Georgia, you have to do it only if you register a corporation. And there’s a lot of such nuances not only in the United States of America but also in other countries. Consider them when creating your eCommerce website.