If you are wondering how to create an Internet sales website, you are in the right place, because in this article we will explain the step by step to anyone who wants to sell their products online.
The market has evolved and nowadays sales through the Internet are already part of the day-to-day of both consumers and small, medium and large companies.
This is a gigantic market. Only in the first half of 2016, according to Digital Commerce 360, E-commerce sales grew 15.6% in 2016 and will reach $ 523 billion by 2020. The best news of all is that it is possible to create a sales website for any type of business, be it small or large. Better yet, in many cases it is not necessary to make a big investment for this.
In this article, we will introduce you to several options available in the market and even give some good ideas to anyone who wants to make money selling through the Internet.
The Step by Step How to Set Up an E-Commerce Website
When selling online, first you will need a website hosted on your own domain. Avoid free hosting, because this type of site does not bring reliability. One tip is to register the domain yourself to prevent third parties from seizing it, keeping you hostage to the hosting company or developer. Once that’s done, it is time to create the website itself, but before that you will need to define what you will sell online.
Choosing The Best Design For Your Website
Before we talk about how to create an Internet sales site, you will need to define exactly what you intend to sell. If your E-Commerce website has only a few products to market, you can use the WordPress platform, the world\’s best platform for creating websites, blogs and even virtual stores. We can say that it is the real “Swiss Knife” of online business. While using WordPress, you can work with an E-Commerce plugin like WooCommerce, for example. Installation is easy and setup as well. With WooCommerce, you can sell practically anything online.
One of the reasons we suggest this solution to anyone looking to learn how to design an E-Commerce website is that it is scalable, that is, when your business grows, you can create a virtual store in WordPress itself.
The Virtual Store Option
If your business model is more like a virtual store itself, then we have several other options. As previously stated, it is possible to design a complete virtual shop with WordPress, simply by acquiring an e-commerce template for WordPress and having WooCommerce installed.
If you are not too keen to deal with systems, like with most people, another option to setting up a virtual store yourself is to hire a digital marketing agency to help design an e-commerce platform that is tailored to your specific needs.
In this case you have two options, either build it yourself with a rental website builder, or hire a marketing agency, pay a monthly fee to the developer and have a system that is unique for you. This latter option is more expensive, but it allows you to focus on your business and guarantees your store will run smoothly, providing the best return on your investment. The important thing in this case is to analyze in detail the features offered by each solution, to choose the e-commerce platform that best suits your case.
Now that you already know how to create an E-Commerce website, let’s discuss one of the most sensitive parts of the business: How to receive online payments.
How to Receive Your Payments Online
What has already been one of the main challenges for those who wanted to set up an online sales site, nowadays is one of the simplest tasks. There are currently several options for integrating payment methods on a website.
The easiest is to use payment gateways, services that intermediate the processing of online payments. Among the best known are Authorize.Net and PayPal.
The integration with your E-Commerce website is very easy. In the case of WordPress, it can be done simply by installing a plugin. That way, you will not need programmers or other technical services to deploy this feature on your website.
With these payment gateways, you can issue tickets and accept all credit cards payment via wire transfer. Not bad, don’t you think?
Alternatively, you can also start with direct integration with credit card and bank administrators, but this is much more labor intensive and will require deep programming knowledge.
Hope we were able to shine some light on this matter and answer any questions regarding E-Commerce website designs. If you have further questions, feel free to call us directly at (954) 633-2963 or send us a message at [email protected].
