8 Smart Ways To Build Your Online Store

Creating an online store is one of the creative ways on how to earn online today. There are lots of tools on how you can create an eCommerce website, some are budget-friendly and some are quite expensive. However, since you are only starting, you should not worry much about making it look “big” and “classy” right away. Just keep in mind some smart, kick ass ways on how to build your online store.

1.Plan on Getting a Relevant Domain Name

A domain name is what you are being identified with in the internet community. It is your company name, your brand name, or words that describe your products and services. It is the name used by your clients to find you in the web. It is unique but comes with a price. It is smart to plan for what domain name to use because it adds to the “excitement” your website creates. Think of “Google” or “Yahoo”. Planning for a relevant domain name also adds up to the ability of search engines to identify, index, and categorize your website on the web. It helps your website boost its search engine visibility which is a good thing because you are putting up an online store that needs search engine referrals.

2. Choose the best Web Hosting

You just don’t select a web host just because they are cheap. Usually, cheap web hosting plans comes with cheap services as well. Look for a best web host that could cater the size of your website. Maybe you’re planning to give some sub-domain spaces for your personnel or your clients, or add more pages to the current number of pages you’re planning to put up. Preparing a bigger space means more freedom to edit and modify your web pages. 

3. Edit your permalinks

Consider your website as a book with lots of chapters. Each chapter of the book have titles, so just like permalinks or permanent links, they deserve to get a title just as so they will be properly identified and categorized. What happens if you do not have properly labeled permalinks?

1. Your users will have the notion of “getting lost” because they are not sure of where they are in your website, most especially in cases where they arrive into a bad page.
2. Search Engines will not be able to put so much value on such pages upon crawling because they are labeled with http://www.whatabadpage.com/?p=1983.

4. Product Page Design

Once you arrive to the point of designing your product page, you have to decide as to how you would like to present your products and services in a way where it can promote good navigation and as well as present the right information. Decide whether you are going to put up a Gallery View Page or a Blog-Style Product presentation. 

1. Gallery View – This product page design presents a photo gallery of products and services with information on price, number of products left in the store, and the checkout button. The photos are clickable which leads to a page where products are individually described.
2. Blog-Style – This is not commonly used today in eCommerce websites because users need to scroll previews pages in order to check out products and services. However, it is simpler to design compared to product galleries.

5. Open a Merchant Account

Setting up a merchant account allows customers to be able to pay for products and services through a variety of payment methods such as credit card payments, bank transfers, PayPal monies, etc. This allows an increase in sales and profit because customers have more ability and freedom to purchase goods and services according to their capabilities. 

6. Shopping Cart

The idea of placing shopping carts in online shopping allow users to have the feeling of “real shopping” just because they have a shopping cart to fill it with products until they reach checkout—but not only that—it also allows users to know how many products are there in the cart, the subtotal of products you already chose as they go along shopping, allows them to leave the shopping carts and save the current activity and go back to them once they’re ready to purchase, and add or remove products as they go along.

7. Trouble Ticket and Customer Support

Adding trouble ticket options for your customers will allow them to interact with you, should they encounter problems while using the products they bought or the services they paid for. Also, it is kind of assuring for users to know that they have an outlet for their inquiries. Customer support through chat, email, and phone call are also efficient ways of reaching out to your customers. 

8. Get your contact information and form ready

Adding contact information and contact forms to your online store adds more credibility to your website. Giving your clients the right information on how to reach them makes your website more human-centric. Once you put your customers’ needs on top of your priority as an online businessman, you will be assured that you will get a good amount of feedback and repeat transactions from your customers.