ecommerce startup

There are five steps to building your ecommerce startup. Before transacting business on your Web site, you should select vendors to assist you in each step of establishing your ecommerce startup, or look for a vendor that provides an integrated solution. Choosing a single vendor that offers a complete suite of ecommerce services can often simplify the process, save time, and be less expenive in the long-run. The following five steps you need to to complete before launching your ecommerce starup.

1. Choosing and registering a domain name.

What’s in a name? Plenty when you are an ecommerce starup. It is not only your brand, it’s also your address on the web. Once you’ve selected what name you wish to use, you must register it with a domain registration service. You can select from hundreds of domain registration services that cater to ecommerce starup websites. Even though your Internet Service Provider or your web host is ofte able to perform this task for you, you should ensure the domain is registered in your name only to avoid domain name hijacking.

2. Website Design and Development

The key decision at this step is to determine whether you plan to build your site yourself or have a provider build it for you. If you choose to build your site yourself (either by purchasing a related software package or using a “browser-based” store-building package that you download from the Web), keep in mind you will not only have the initial task of construction but also the ongoing responsibility of making modifications to the site.

With many Web building services and software products available to assist businesses in designing a Web Store, you do not have to take on this project by yourself. However, even with a Web building service provider, you still must consider several critical issues to ensure that the site you build meets your vision and needs:

What products/services do you want to sell? What do you want the look and feel of your logo and your site overall to be? What type of navigation tools do you want to use? By what forms of payment do you wish to transact business? How are you going to calculate tax and shipping charges?

Once you’ve made these decisions, you are ready to develop your product catalog. You’ll need to provide necessary information on each product, i.e. description, color, size and price. This catalog is expandable, so that you may add to it as your business and product offering grows.

After the product catalog is completed, your Web building vendor can publish your Web site online.

3. Server Hosting

Another major decision that businesses joining the electronic marketplace must face is whether to buy a server and host their Web site in-house, or to outsource the entire operation to a service provider. For many smaller businesses, outsourcing is the most viable and cost-effective option. Establishing your own operation is complicated and can take several months to set up, whereas using a hosting service can take less than an hour to set up. It will also speed the time it takes customers to download pages on your Web site, improving the customers’ experience on your site.

4. Payment Solutions

In order to become truly e-commerce enabled, you must have the following: Payment software, a merchant account, payment processing services and a gateway to connect all these elements of the payment process. You also will need cash register software to help easily calculate sales tax as well as shipping charges, and may want to include a shopping cart function as well.

In order to start transacting business and accepting payments, you must first open an account with a merchant bank. Checking out dozens of merchant banks to find the one for you can be an arduous process, but a fully integrated solution eliminates the need for this task.

Once you have established an account, your merchant bank retains the services of a payment processing company to “acquire” transactions of your customers, secure the funds from the customers’ credit card issuer and place that money into your merchant account. This is the last part of the payment solutions equation

5. Traffic Coverage

“If you build it they will come.”

If only it were that easy with e-tailing. However, no matter how great your Web site is, no one will come to it if they don’t know you are there. This is where driving traffic and transactions becomes an essential element of your e-commerce plan.

The first step in building traffic is registering your site with search engines. Again, there are vendors that will do this for you. For registration, you will need to think of keywords that will be associated with your site, and acquire links to your website using those keywords as anchor text.

Another advantage of building a link exchane program is the possibility of cross promotions with other ecommerce startups. You can establish relationships with sites that reach a similar demographic group and offer premiums in exchange for links, referrals and demographic information. For instance, you and another ecommerce starups could include taglines about each other’s stores in your purchase confirmation emails.