Building an eCommerce Website Quickly

Building an eCommerce Website

Planning to grow your business online? Want to increase sales of your products? In such a pandemic situation, when no one wants to visit the store offline due to the fear of coronavirus infection, how would you manage to influence your target customers and drive conversions to your business? Building an eCommerce website is a solution.

Even if you’re selling in your physical storefronts, investing in e-commerce websites is required to keep your business running even in uncertain times.

Table of Content:

  1. 3 Reasons why you should have your own e-commerce store
  2. Required Features of E-commerce Store
  3. Quick Steps for Building an eCommerce Website

3 Reasons why you should have your own e-commerce store

Here is why you should have your own e-commerce store:

  • People tend to search and buy online from a trusted e-commerce store. Whether it is a household core, food items, technology products, they are spending more online to buy all these products.
  • Setting up a physical storefront requires a huge cost of infrastructure plus overheads, showrooms, and branding costs. Whereas, an e-commerce website can be started by incurring a low cost. No need to incur costs on huge infrastructure, etc.
  • Convenience is what everyone looks for while shopping offline or online. With an e-commerce store, it becomes easy for your customers to shop whatever they want right from their homes.

Let’s look at what are the required features of e-commerce store and how easy it is to set it up like a pro without any need to code from scratch.

Required Features of E-commerce Store

In order to make your website user-friendly from all aspects, it is required to enrich it with all such website elements that are essential for an e-commerce website.

15 must-have feature of e-commerce websites include:

  1. User-friendly & Mobile responsive
  2. Attractive Home Page
  3. Optimized product and category pages
  4. Easy-to-use navigation menu
  5. High-quality and optimized product images & videos
  6. Product reviews and rating system
  7. Promotional offers, deals & discounts
  8. Add to wish lists
  9. Add to cart
  10. Related Items
  11. Frequently Asked Questions
  12. Social Proof
  13. Security Features
  14. Reliable and secured payment gateway
  15. Advanced shipping integration

Quick Steps for Building an eCommerce Website

If you don’t have enough time to devote in building an e-commerce website and troubleshooting all the possible issues on your own, it is advisable to hire expert e-commerce developers. Before hiring an e-commerce developer, consider the following aspects:

  • Their working experience
  • Their commission rates or charges
  • Services offered
  • Time duration to complete the task

Want to build an e-commerce website on your own? Follow the steps mentioned below to get started with your online store where your customers can easily shop what they are interested in.

1. Get Your Domain Name

Website Domain Name

The first step is to make your brand identity over the web. For this, you need to buy a domain name at which your e-commerce store will point to. This will help your customers know your brand and give a platform to explore your products. Make sure you’re following all the best practices while selecting a domain name for your business. Such as:

  • Avoid creative spellings and generic names
  • Try to keep your domain name as short as possible.
  • Keep it simple to recall.
  • Avoid using any number or symbol.
  • Your domain must be unique.

2. Get an e-commerce Website Builder

Selecting an e-commerce website builder is a good option if you want to build an e-commerce website without spending your time in any coding knowledge. Visit the website, compare the solutions and features, and then decide which platform will be the best for you.

eCommerce website builder

Here are some of the interesting options to choose from:

Platform Features Website Link
WooCommerce
  • Customizable and open-source eCommerce platform for WordPress.
  • Offer Flexible and Secure Payments
  • Manage Orders On the Go
  • Set multilingual content and prices in multiple currencies.
  • And, many more features.
Visit Website
BigCommerce
  • Easy-to-use, secure, and open SaaS platform
  • Third-party app integration
  • Omnichannel commerce
  • Powerful Analytics
  • And, many more.
Visit Website
Shopify
  • 70+ professional themes
  • Mobile commerce ready
  • Edit HTML and CSS
  • Get your own domain name
  • And, many more.
Visit Website
Magento Solutions are available for:

  • Small Business
  • Mid-Market and Enterprise
  • Adobe Commerce Cloud
  • B2B companies
  • Global Expansion
  • And, many more.
Visit Website
3dCart
  • 200 plus built-in features
  • 50 free themes
  • SEO-ready
  • More than 100 supported payment processors
  • And, many more.
Visit Website
Squarespace
  • Pre-built templates
  • Flexible Payments, Checkout, and Taxes
  • Useful commerce integrations
  • Mobile Store Management
  • And, many more.
Visit Website

From all the above options, I would recommend you to go with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress that allows adding, managing, and selling products online quite easily.

However, if your choice is also WooCommerce, here is how you can continue further:

3. Get WordPress Hosting and Download WordPress

WordPress Hosting

Since you have selected working with WooCommerce and it is a WordPress plugin, it is required to purchase WordPress hosting from a secured and trusted website hosting provider.

You can get your WordPress hosting from any reliable web hosting company such as BlueHost, Siteground, or GoDaddy.

Once you have purchased it, the next step is to download and set up WordPress.

WordPress is the most powerful content management system that makes it easy to create any type of website by using WordPress plugins and themes. WordPress plugins are used to add required functionality on website whereas WordPress themes allow making websites looks responsive, interactive, and beautiful.

This open-source software offers many powerful features such as customizable designs, SEO friendly, responsive mobile sites, high performance, high security, powerful media management, etc. You can add an online store, galleries, mailing lists, forums, analytics, and much more by using WordPress plugins.

4. Download and Setup WooCommerce Theme

Next, you have to set up a WordPress e-commerce theme that offers dedicated support to WooCommerce and allows you to customize the website appearance the way you want. One such WooCommerce theme is FashionBuzz. FashionBuzz theme offers compatibility with WooCommerce and Elementor page builder.

FashionBuzz theme is perfect for selling all types of products online. See below how your single product page will look like:

WooCommerce Theme

Along with that, you can easily drive huge traffic to your website by publishing keyword-rich blogs using its attractive blog layouts. Besides, Custom Post Type varieties make it easy to create all types of content quite easily. And, Gutenberg support allows you to visualize your content in an eye-catchy manner.

You can use Blog Post widgets for recent, related, and random posts. Other useful widgets include About Us, Flickr Photo Stream, and Side Menu Widget. Other notable features include multiple headers and Mega menus, SEO-friendly, speed optimized, mobile-ready, advanced theme panel & customization options, RTL support, and more.

Download here: WordPress WooCommerce Theme

Multi-vendor Marketplace theme:

Apart from that, if you want to create a multi-vendor marketplace, you need to pick such a theme that offers website stuling options for such functionality.

One such theme is StoreMate. StoreMate is a multi-vendor e-commerce theme for WordPress that allows setting up an e-commerce marketplace like Amazon or eBay instantly. The one-click demo import option makes it easy to load the demo content withing minutes.

The theme comes with attractive shop page designs to make your WooCommerce store look eye-catchy. And, for a multi-vendor e-commerce solution, it also offers dedicated support to Dokan multi-vendor marketplace plugin along with attractive Dokan page designs.

For any store, it is important to showcase its products in an organized way. With the grid and list listing options and single product page customization offered by the StoreMate theme, you can easily organize and showcase your products listing to your customers. Other notable features include automated mega menu support, additional Dokan widgets, Gutenberg ready, multiple header layouts, multilingual and RTL support, optimized mobile menu panel, and a lot more.

Download here: WordPress Multivendor eCommerce Theme

5. Download and setup WooCommerce

eCommerce website builder

Next step is to add e-commerce store features to your WordPress website. For this, you need to download and set up WooCommerce plugin. Navigate to your WordPress Dashboard–> Plugins–> Add New.

From here, you can search for WooCommerce and then install and activate it. WooCommerce allows you to sell both physical as well as digital products online. You can set up your online store with attractive homepage design, menus, site structure, and payment and shipping options.

6. Add Your Products to WooCommerce Store

Once you are done with WooCommerce installation and setup, it’s time to add and organize your products. At the time of adding products, you need to keep the following points in mind:

  • Product Description: Describe your product in a way that is easy-to-understand by your customers. Make sure you have added relevant keywords within your product descriptions.
  • Product Images: Before making an actual purchase, customers want to see how the product looks like. Its color, size, alternative options, quality, etc. are such factors that they want to know about it. So, make sure, the image is of high-quality, responsive, and if possible, it should be of a white background.
  • Product Categories: Not all products you’re selling are of the same category. To make it easy for your customers to search for products and navigate your store, it is advisable to organize all your products within relevant product categories.

7. Secured Payment Gateway option

WooCommerce Payment Gateway

Once your potential customers have found the product they might be interested in, they would add it in their cart and look for a solution through which they can proceed with the transaction. Therefore, you need to integrate a reliable payment gateway option in your e-commerce store.

Since you are working with WooCommerce, you will have a dashboard where you can easily manage your online payments and track cash flow into your bank account. There are many ways you can take payments with your customers. Some of the preferred WooCommerce Payment Options include immediate payment, pre-order payment option, recurring products and subscription payment option, deposit payment option. Know more about WooCommerce Payment Options.

Here is a list of top WooCommerce Payment Gateway plugins that will help you out in establishing a secured payment gateway on WooCommerce.

8. Integrate Shipping Method

Shipping Method

Before launching your e-commerce website, make sure you have integrated a proper shipping method as per the convenience of your customers. The following points are with considering while selecting a shipping method for your e-commerce store:

  • Shipping origin address
  • Shipping zones, i.e., domestic shipping or international shipping
  • Flexible shipping options
  • Shipping services

WooCommerce also comes with a WooCommerce Shipping solution for USPS, i.e., United States Postal Service that you can access right from your WooCommerce dashboard. This allows printing discounted labels for domestic and international shipments. You can check it out here

You can take the help of the best shipment tracking plugins such as Shipping Details Plugin For WooCommerce, WooCommerce Shipping Tracker, Blue Dart Tracking, YITH WooCommerce Order Tracking, Status And Order Tracking, WPCargo, and more. Explore all these WooCommerce Shipment Tracking Plugins here.

9. Preview and Make Your E-commerce Store Live

Now, it’s time to make your store publish. Don’t forget to make a final review before publishing it.

Make sure that the checkout functions are working properly, products are managed well, store’s functions are working fine, your e-commerce store is responsive for all the devices, compatibility with browsers, etc.

All o.k.? Then, launch it.

Ready to sell your products online?

This is how you can increase your revenue by selling your products online on your own e-commerce website. Although it takes a bit of time and effort, with the help of website builders, you can easily manage to make it live.

Any queries or opinions you would like to share with us? Use the comment section below.

Stay tuned!

Interesting Reads:

Building A Website From Scratch

How To Integrate E-Commerce Apps To Website

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