---

Beginners Guide to Building an eCommerce Website in 2023

eCommerce has changed the dynamics of how products, goods, or services were sold a decade ago. What’s the right time to go digital with your brick and mortar store? And eCommerce for beginners is the right choice or not. The answer to this question is simple – as soon as possible! You should develop an eCommerce website not because we say so.

Numerous statistics dictate that online selling can increase your growth and recognition. And a successful online store helps in growing ecommerce business like never before. Choose the best online store builder in 2023 and also know the steps to build it. 

There lies a huge confusion around eCommerce store development. To bring things into perspective we bring you this blog that shares all the essential information to get your basics right.

Let’s begin by catching a glimpse of the statistical predictions that portray the past and future of the online selling world.

eCommerce Market Statistics

eCommerce has been an evident part of the global retail framework. Here are a few stats that are proof of the same and important to know to build a marketing strategy.

• 2020 saw over 2 billion people buying services and goods online.
• The worldwide e-retail sales reached a whopping 4.2 trillion in 2020.
• 60% of e-retail website visits were made through smartphones.
• The global e-retail traffic record hit a record 22 billion monthly visits in June 2020.

From the preceding stats, you can make sure that eCommerce offers a promising business opportunity to one and all.

Let’s begin with understanding the ‘Why’ one should build an eCommerce website.

Why Develop an eCommerce Website to Sell Products or Services Online?

We as consumers don’t like to be forced into quick decision-making. Your customers or potential clients need a way to discover your brand and learn more about what products or services you have to offer. A full-fledged e commerce store has become the need of the hour.

A paid or free website builder can make a customized commerce store. If your product stays limited to a storefront, more people won’t come to notice it. And in these tough years, the world has shown us, people prefer ordering online now.

Here are some of the other prominent reasons why you should invest in e-retail.

User Demand

Observing the above-mentioned stats you can imagine how consumers have adapted well to the online buying option. The eCommerce sales went up by a good 49% just one month into the pandemic in 2020.

This speaks a lot about how well customers have adapted to the eCommerce world. Today, you can attract customers easily to your business with simple steps. You can use social media platforms for marketing of your business. 

Users live busier lives than ever before and so prefer ordering through their digital devices rather than making a physical visit. You can develop many product pages on your website to meet the demands of customers.

A simple answer would be learning what your competitors are offering. If they do have a website and you don’t, you can lag in that business. Look for a software development company that can help you with web hosting as well.

Costs less than a Brick & Mortar

If you open a brick and mortar store today, you would have to pay for so many things such as rent, licensing & permits, furniture, utility bills, maintenance, cleaning, and more. All of these charges account for a huge amount. Even if your business doesn’t do well in the initial months you still would have to pay many of those charges for a brick and mortar store.

By setting up an eCommerce website you can eliminate most of these costs. There will be other expenses such as buying a domain name, marketing, web hosting services, and more. Yet the overall expense would be less than a brick-and-mortar. Hence, there is risk in both an eCommerce platform offers high returns with minimal investment.

Safe & Convenient

There can be days when you’re so preoccupied with other things or are tired or sick to make an in-person visit to stores. What you don’t want is to spend time driving, moving through the traffic, browsing through the items, standing in queue to pay, and driving back home.

This can be a difficult endeavor, especially for those who are handicapped or have other severe health problems. What if you buy everything with the help of mobile devices?

As opposed to this conventional regime, an eCommerce website can offer you fast and easy services consuming a lot less energy. Eventually, individuals who seek convenient services and the ones that lack time are going to opt for online ordering.

Reach & Recognition

The Internet has no limitations. Your brick-and-mortar store’s recognition is limited to the city or town you live in. If you sell gymming equipment, there is a good chance that when I search for the same on the internet I can find your site’s link.

You will have to work on SEO for your website to achieve this. It’s possible to achieve this with persistent efforts. You would be shocked to learn that 85% of users perform instant web searches for product discovery and online shopping. 

Getting this level of reach also adds folds to your recognition. Once your service creates a reputable name in the market, there is no limitation to how many new users would want to use your services.

Anytime-Anywhere Accessibility

Never in the history of humanity has it been possible to bring a store to a person that fits in a 6-inch screen? But smartphones and apps are making that possible. People can order with their Credit card on the website. This is the biggest reason why e-retail services have received such hype.

They make a user free of the tension one holds in the absence of online services. It allows time-poor individuals and families to prioritize their shopping whether it is for groceries, healthcare, clothing, or utility.

How to Create your eCommerce Website?

This brings us to the most-awaited subject of discussion. How can you build an eCommerce website? This process is long and tedious, so we offer you a stepwise guide to learning the ABC of ecommerce site development.

Step 1: Find your Niche & Market Research

There are many things that you can sell online. Right from your bedroom’s furniture to a safety pin, the spectrum of the selling market is huge. If you’re a beginner you have to keep in mind that selling a product that requires high investment and risk won’t serve you well.

So, you must select products or services that are most in need and what you can sell earning maximum margin. Likewise, look for the best web hosting services and increase the chances of your website getting popular.

Once you narrow in on the list of products you want to sell, you should carry out extensive market research on all of them. You should know what your competitors are offering, where will you buy them, what is a particular product’s requirement, and more. Market research will guide you in learning which products are worth investing in and which aren’t.

Step 2: Analyze your Competition

No matter which business industry you choose, you know there will be competition. Your competitors can be your greatest teachers. You can learn all about how they are offering their services, what they lack, which business idea they follow, and all other things required for you to do your online business.

If you want to start earning from the go, you don’t want to commit the same mistakes your competitors are making. So, it becomes extremely necessary to analyze your competition.

Step 3: Getting Market Ready

You must be ready to do business right away. So, you must have a heavy stock of your products in place. This would assist you by not having to worry if you get too many orders at the start. You must make sure that the products you sell are lightweight because they’re easier to ship.

As in the early days of your business, you would have to pack and ship by yourself. You can offer free shipping to increase online sales.

You also have to test your product in the market before you decided to sell. Hence, you can create a prototype for the same. It’s possible that you can’t build a perfect product from the start and prototyping will give you time to gather feedback and make improvements.

Step 4: Choose your Business Model

The eCommerce industry implies the business-to-consumer (B2C) model. Meaning when a company directly sells or markets its products to a consumer. You make a B2C transaction every time you visit a restaurant or watch a movie in a theater or visit a spa or salon. 

For an eCommerce website, there are 5 business models that you can follow i.e. online intermediaries, advertising-based, community-based, direct sellers, and fee-based. Online intermediaries offer a platform to buyers and sellers and take a commission out of each transaction.

Using the advertising model a sponsor can advertise on your eCommerce platform and you will earn money from the same. The best example of a community-based business idea is Facebook. It targets a user via ads based on their location and demographics.

Direct selling is the most prominent business model used by eCommerce websites. It’s when a buyer directly purchases products from online retailers. Lastly, fee-based models are companies that offer their services for a specific fee, For example, Netflix or other subscription-based applications.

Step 5: Essential Features & Design Phase

Selecting the features for your app and online store can be a daunting task. For any app that you want to create, it’s necessary to offer features that are most relevant to users. And the ones that they can intuitively figure out.

To design a high-performing, simple, and well-designed app, you would have to ask yourself ‘What are the users looking for when they use your website?’ This will help you create a proficient website with the most essential features. 

Design is a vital part of a website. You don’t want to create a website that looks fancy in the eyes and has a terrible UI/UX. So, spending a good amount of time looking for the right design will provide huge benefits in the future. 

To envision the website that you wish to create, you can wireframe your designs and draw sketches to understand how you want your users to navigate between screens.

Step 6: How to Choose the Right eCommerce Platform for your eCommerce Store?

There are numerous options that you can exercise to create your eCommerce store. Here’s a list of the most prominent options that you can choose from and create build an online store.

Magento

Magento is an open-source technology to build an eCommerce website. It has built-in PHP and was introduced on March 31, 2008. In 2018, Magento was taken over by Adobe. Magento offers a flexible cart system, along with control over the functionality, look, and content of the store.

If you’re looking forward to creating eCommerce sites, you should surely seek help from a Magento development company. Magento provides you with scalability and a variety of free themes and plug-ins. The platform is designed so that it can also be accessed by someone who isn’t a website builder.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a plugin introduced by WordPress. With WooCommmerce development you can manage your online store with essential features such as tax management, shipping integration, secure payments, and inventory management. 

Moreover, different modes are used for payment processing. And a payment processor offers various features to make the process easy.

The plugin has received a whopping 27 million downloads and powers 99% of WordPress stores. WordPress is the best content management system. You can improve your existing WordPress site. It’s relatively easy to use but not for beginners.

If you’re a beginner to build a WordPress website you should hire WooCommerce developers from your project’s inception. 

It offers the best of services due to the versatile library of plugins available. Besides it, there are many web hosting service providers in the market, select the best for your professional website.

Shopify

Shopify app development allows you to create your online store. Using this one of the popular e commerce platforms you can sell in person using POS and sell online with your own e commerce website. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert or a beginner with eCommerce, Shopify has features for all.

The platform offers you a free 14-day trial during which you can observe the services it offers and test the free Shopify apps. Shopify has monthly plans that you can choose from. The most budget-friendly plan is Shopify Lite which starts at 9 USD/month.

Shopify’s most basic plan chosen by first-time owners starts at 29 USD/month. But if you’re an experienced business owner you can also choose Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus. You can also try Shopify custom theme development to develop engaging themes for your e commerce website.

Create your eCommerce Website from Scratch

This is a viable option for those who have the time and a fairly high budget if they want a fully functional website. This process follows a definite roadmap that starts with you sharing your online business idea with an eCommerce development company like ours i.e. Technource.

We then brainstorm solutions with our expert design and development team and offer a quotation that includes all the details of your project starting from the time it will take to cost.

IT services companies tend to follow an app development methodology to create an effective online store. They can change your brick and mortar stores into online stores. Moreover, help you get a free SSL certificate.

We follow the Agile-Scrum methodology as it offers transparent communication and rapid app development. Your e commerce website once created goes for various quality assurance checks and then gets deployed on the web. Though your job doesn’t end here as your web will need post-project consultation to fix the bugs and offer updates.

Step 7: Get your Content Ready

Content is the most essential part of any website. If you learn how earning high SERPs can boost your growth and production, you can leverage content marketing agencies to achieve popularity quickly.

You would have to follow the right SEO practices for the same. Once the content is ready, people will visit your site. And you can start selling products online.

To achieve this you might want to consider seeking help from a ‘Content Specialist’ and a ‘Digital Marketing Head’. They will know exactly what measures you should take to get your e commerce website featured among Google’s top search results.

Step 8: Quality Assurance Checks

Your website will be searched by millions of users from myriad devices having different OSs, aspect ratios, and screen sizes. To make sure your website functions equally well across all platforms, you have to run several quality checks. You would need a quality assurance engineer to take care of those things for you.

Step 9: Launching your Store

If you’ve followed the above steps, you’re just one away from the last of this battle. Remember though the war is still to come. So, you must make sure that you have cross-checked all features of different pages on your ecommerce site. Make sure your content is grammatically polished and free from typos and errors.

You will get only one chance to make that first impression, so make sure you do it right. The most prominent errors occur during the final check-out time. Make sure you complete trial purchases and payment processing from finding the product to purchasing it using your payment gateways.

Step 10: feedback & Maintenance

Once your e commerce website gets launched it’s out for the users you created it for. It’s open for consumers to use and express their views on the same. You will have to face judgment and criticism of what you’ve created. This can be overwhelming but you have to make the best out of it and work well on the same.

Bonus: How can Technource Assist you with eCommerce Store Development?

Technource offers IT services in various domains starting from web development and mobile application development integrating other emerging techs. We are an easy-to-work company that follows the transparent Agile-Scrum methodology for all its projects.

We can surely offer expert advice on what you can do to get your e-commerce business up and running online stores. Our sole aim is to cultivate our knowledge and design software solutions that cater best to our client’s needs.

How to promote your eCommerce store?

The internet has so many users around the globe. The websites you find while searching for niche services on Google, don’t appear by themselves. They follow the norms and work hard to achieve high SERPs.

If you don’t hard for it it’s possible your clients won’t ever find out about your eCommerce website. Here are some of the most common methods used for eCommerce marketing.

• Social Media Marketing
• SEO
• Email Marketing
• PPC Advertising

Let’s have a brief look at each of the above.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can kill two birds with one stone. You can increase your brand awareness by posting the right things with the right hashtags and drive traffic to your eCommerce site. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram are the best mediums to promote your services.

SEO

Search engines provide your websites with authority if your content is relevant and in congruence with the engine’s algorithm. And Search Engine Optimization helps you increase that authority. Too confusing?

Then, in a nutshell, SEO increases your chances of getting featured on the first page of Google. But this can only happen if you follow the right SEO practices.

Here’s a list of things that SEO consists of

Here’s a list of things that SEO consists of

• On-site Optimization
• Keyword Ranking
• Creating Backlinks
• Content Marketing

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a big deal for every company. Any user that opts for receiving emails is someone who’s an avid user of your services. Using emails you can form relationships with your clients, offer them discounts, make them feel good on special occasions, and more. However, before getting started, you need to use professional email finder tools so that you won’t message the wrong audience. The LinkedIn email finder is one of the most effective tools to use due to its professionalism and huge data.

In the eCommerce world, it’s essential to get new customers but it’s more important that they keep returning in the future. It is important for online marketplaces to survive. You can also provide multiple sales channels.

PPC Advertising

The preceding methods do offer results but require a good amount of time and effort. If you want instant traffic on your ecommerce sites, opt for paid advertising. You can try Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising where you would be charged by respective platforms when people click on them.

Moreover, you can run email marketing campaigns. You’re not charged on the metric of how many times they’ve been shown. PPC advertising strategy can increase online shopping on your site.

Wrapping Up

Here’s a wrap on this read. We hope our blog touched on important sections related to eCommerce website development. Competition in the e-retail world is on the rise, so if you wish to create your own online store, you should get in touch with us right now. We – Technource has been serving the IT service industry for 9+ years and eCommerce website development has become a niche we’re experts in.

If designing a website can prove to be too tedious a task for you, you can hire eCommerce developers from Technource at the most affordable rates. You can get in touch with us by signing up for a free consultation form on our website.

Frequently Asked Questions: eCommerce Website Development 

How to develop an impressive eCommerce website?

We can only decide how impressive your e commerce site is based on how it operates. You should make sure your website is engaging, fast, user-friendly, and professional. You should also be particular in informing your consumers of the exact status of their products.

What security risks are involved with eCommerce websites?

There are three basic dimensions to security i.e. integrity, availability, and confidentiality. Website owners must use a strategy to protect the site and the transactional data of consumers.

What’s the limit to my database and the number of products or categories that I can add?

There is no limit to how many categories you can add or how many users transact. This is the biggest benefit of an online store – unlimited storage and unlimited growth.

How long will it take to develop my eCommerce website?

This is a tough ask because this period depends on the complexity of your website, and which tech stack you use, are you using a web development platform or are you building it from scratch?

What should I do to create my ecommerce site from scratch?

If you’re creating your first online store, you can opt for a free website builder. But if you’re a prominent player of the game and are wishing to go enterprise-level, you can create your website from scratch.

How can I monetize my eCommerce site from its launch?

There are many ways to monetize a website. First and foremost by earning commissions from buyers and sellers on each transaction. The other quick way to make money is by featuring ads.