Website Design 411

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E Commerce website design can be as intricate or simple as your needs require. The simplest form of E Commerce website is just allowing a user to purchase a product or pay for a service through your website. If you have limited products and very few options you may not even require a shopping cart for your site. If you have many products, options, and additional add-on products that you would need to offer your users, then a more robust E Commerce website complete with a shopping cart and member log-in feature may be required.

Having an ecommerce website design team figure out what would be beneficial to your business would definitely be a plus.

There are many ways to enhance E Commerce websites. The key factor that should always be taken into consideration however, is how to make a simple checkout process that will increase your sales conversions. Nothing will turn a potential customer away faster than a clunky, confusing checkout process. Users lose interest and trust very quickly on the web. You want to keep the attention of your user completely during checkout, making it as easy as possible to add add-on or up-sell products and checking out in a clear and concise way with as few steps as you can. In many cases we have seen this become the biggest challenge for our clients. Even though they have so many needs with regard to their customized checkout and shipping processes, we never lose site of the fact that we must not confuse the client. No matter how technical the back end of your checkout process is, we will make it seem like buying products or services from your website is a breeze.

E Commerce Website Design

Below are some of the most important points to consider before you begin to design your new E Commerce website:

• Who is my target market?
• How would I like users to find my products online? Can we assign your products to specific categories for easier sorting and searching on your website?
• Do I have any special shipping considerations? Many clients simply ship from one location. This is the simplest way to handle shipping if you can charge a flat fee with every transactions. In many cases this is not possible. Perhaps you don't have a physical location and your users will be buying products on your site that are shipping from manufacturers in many different locations. In this case you would need to calculating the shipping cost based on the origin zip code of the manufacturer. You may have a hand full or hundreds of manufacturers. This "multi vendor shipping" is a bit more complicated and these types of issues should be brought up and thought out early on. This way any features that may be required can be built into the admin so that the owner of the site can completely control his custom shipping on his site with ease.
• Do I have any special checkout calculations that need to be considered? Maybe your lucky and your products are all the same price and you have a flat fee for shipping, that's great! However many of our clients have specials needs that have to be considered and planned out from the start so that they integrate completely with the rest of your E Commerce software and admin. An example would be a flooring company that needs to consider the size and weight of the entire order. In this example the checkout would need to calculate how heavy the entire order is, how many square feet the entire order is, and where the product is being shipped from in order to provide an accurate price to the client. All of these factors need to be gathered and calculated in a clear and easy way to the client. Your client does not care how you are arriving at the quote he is receiving from your checkout, he just wants it fast and as affordable as possible. Save Money We can help with the first part of that equation and because we help you think through the entire flow of your E Commerce website upfront, you won't need to spend any additional money on further customizations after our initial design, we hope those savings will pass through to your customers!
• Do I need a member log-in to the E Commerce website? There are many reasons to consider requiring your users to have to log-in in order to purchase products from your website. It's easier to track and market to your users if they become a registered member of your website. You can gather more detailed information about the habits and behaviors of your registered members than you could allowing unregistered users to purchase from your website. Being able to gather detailed information allows you to market to effectively to your registered members that you could with the basic info you collect on unregistered users. Allowing users to login to rate and review products may make them feel like they are part of a larger community and increase their feeling that your site is an authority site that embraces technology to enhance your users experience on your site. They may have a feeling that your not "just trying to sell" them and then don't care about them after the sale.
• Do I need to accept more than one currency on my E Commerce website? If you plan to sell to other countries or allow clients from other countries to purchase products from your E Commerce site, you may need to allow them to purchase using the currency of their homeland. This is something you want to consider upfront so that the full functionality can be built into your custom E Commerce website design from the start. You want to avoid having to add these types of features after the site is completed. The chances are it will be much more difficult to add on after the fact than if you had taken it into consideration from the beginning of your project.
• How will I collect payment from my users? Do you have a merchant account that will allow you to accept credit cards? Do you plan to accept Pay pal, Checks, Cash on Delivery, Google Checkout, or any of the other free payment gateways? We can help you setup multiple options so that it is as easy as possible for your users to purchase your products with their preferred payment type. By thinking about how you would like to allow your users to pay for your products early on in the design process, you will save yourself a lot of headaches later on in the game.
• Will my E Commerce website be SEO friendly? We can't think of a reason NOT to create an E Commerce website that is fully SEO friendly. This means all meta tags and the actual URL are completely utilized for search engine crawling and placement. Rather than show a URL that has a bunch of PHP or ASP code in it, you want to use words that the search engines can actually crawl and index. This is a huge factor for any site, especially and E Commerce site that will have many more pages than most other site because of hteir products. We help make sure that your E Commerce website is designed with SEO in mind. We make it easy to add additional meta tags on your new products when you add them through your site admin.
• How easy is it going to be to manage my E Commerce website once it's done? We recognize that if you are like most companies selling a product or a service online, you will need to update and add to your site in the future. This is why it's so important to have a fully functional back end administrator with content management ability. Through this admin you should be able to add new products, modify existing products, change your menu items, add or change existing static pages, manage your orders, view statistics and reports, manage your users, alter pricing and discounts, modify any shipping factors you may have and more. The only way to make sure these and others features are accessible through your admin interface is to think about them upfront. By consulting about your individual needs for a brief time upfront, we will save you time and money having to go back and make any major modifications to your website in the future. We want to give you everything you need the first time, and do it right!

These are just a few of the main considerations we like to point out to our clients when helping them think through the needs of their new E Commerce web design with Website Design 411. The other main factor that can't be overlooked is the aesthetic style of your E-Commerce website. There are so many template sites out there that all look like clones of one another. In order to engage your visitors, build trust with them, and to stand out from your competition, you want your E Commerce website to look different. You want a custom design that will tell your potential user withing seconds of landing on it exactly what it is you offer them, and engage them quickly with featured products and simple navigation that will allow them to dig deeper into your offerings without any hassles. You want to show that you are active on social networks, that you have users reviewing your products or services, and showcase recent blog posts by your company to them. Your users will appreciate the fact that you have chosen to stand out and take pride in your online shopping platform. As users become increasingly technically savvy, they expect a higher level of website design and interface from the E Commerce sites they use to buy products. by embracing the latest social marketing and E Commerce technologies, you will show your users that they have no need to look any further once they land on your website. You will stand out and therefore have a higher conversion rate than your competition.

Get a Free Consultation about your E Commerce website needs now. The best way to make sure you are taking full advantage of your website is to be as educated as possible about your options. Request the consultation online or call us now at 800-652-6919 so that we can help you start building your future today.

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