Creating an Ecommerce Website

Ecommerce website

Selling products on-line requires a really different setup from your run-of-the-mill blogging site. Let’s check out the items you will need to believe when fixing an eCommerce website and help to elucidate why they cost more to style.

First, let me tell you what we're not getting to cover during this article.

We're not assuming that an ecommerce website may be a single website with some PayPal button codes inserted onto it.

The PayPal buttons are great and work alright for those selling a couple of things, but we're taking e-commerce to the subsequent level and giving the customer a far better online shopping experience.

Most modern eCommerce websites are applications. they need an interface, administration settings, store data during a database, and follow a work-flow of processes. We're getting to touch on a number of these areas.

The Basics An eCommerce website is often thought of as a play with actors performing its scenes

The main actors in an eCommerce website are:

* The Customer - buys products

* The Website Owner - ships bought products & gets paid

* The eCommerce Application - interface between all the actors

* The Payment Gateway - handles payment transactions (more on this later)

* The Merchant/Business Bank Account - Website owner's business bank account (more on this later)

The main buying process of an eCommerce website ('the play') happens as follows:

1. The customer browses product catalog

2. Customer adds a product to the basket

3. Customer buys a product and enters the check-out process

4. eCommerce Application contacts a Payment Gateway

5. Payment Gateway provides secure customer shipping and payment details entry form

6. Customer securely enters shipping and payment information

7. Payment Gateway contacts Website Owners' Merchant Bank Account

8. Merchant Bank Account processes payment transaction and returns control to Payment Gateway

9. Payment Gateway returns Customer to eCommerce Application

10. ecommerce Application notifies Customer of successful (or failed) payment

11. eCommerce Application notifies Website Owner of purchase

12. Website Owner ships product to Customer

Of course, there's a lot more detail going on in each step, but hopefully, you get the general idea that setting up an eCommerce application is a tad more complicated than your regular blog-style website.

Where Do You Start?

Sounds silly right, but the first step you need to do is think about the types of things you'll be selling on-line.

Are these products?, i.e. physical items that require packaging and posting or services provided by yourself or another provider e.g. Professional Yak Grooming.

How may products or types of services are you going to offer? Local or International? Are some seasonal? Do you have a finite stock level for particular items? Do you plan to use special offers & discounts? Do you even like yaks?

This leads to customer and payment questions.

Who are your customers? Where are they? How are they going to pay; credit card, cheque, PayPal? Which bank account will I need to set up?

And then there are the support questions.

How do you handle returned goods? How do you refund payments? How do you handle complaints?

Having a think about the products and services you're going to offer is vital because the first thing a web designer is going to ask you when you're requesting a quote is "How many things are you selling and to whom?"

The reason is of course time and costs.

Selling 50 products to a UK only customer base using PayPal requires a very different setup and hence costs, to one selling 1000+ products internationally and taking credit card payments.

Let’s look closer at some of the important eCommerce application areas.

The e-commerce Application

Essentially, an eCommerce application is a bespoke Content Management System (CMS). So as well as updating posts and blogs it specializes in updating products and services and supporting commerce functions.

Like any CMS, the application splits the eCommerce website into two major parts; the front-end or shop-front where the customer can browse and buy goods and the back-end where you log in to an administration dashboard and manage the website options, including the product catalog.

The Product Catalogue

This will likely be your most important concern and is central to any eCommerce website design.

The product catalog is where all your goods-for-sale data live. The product name, description, cost, stock level, pictures, etc. are all stored in here.

We sometimes get people asking which files their products are stored in and they get in a bit of a tizzy when they can't find them on the server.

Usually, product catalogs are stored in a database, but don't worry - you don't have to know how to use a database. The e-commerce application does that for you through the product catalog interface in the Administration Dashboard.

Being able to manage this yourself is vital, otherwise, you'll be going back and forward to the web developer and the costs will rack up.

Thankfully, the eCommerce applications that we use, Magento and WordPress e-Commerce, once installed, allow you to manage your own product catalog from within the web browser.

The Magento product catalog has advanced options and allows for things like adding discount codes, customer reviews, product videos, etc., whereas the WordPress e-Commerce catalog offers a simpler solution while still covering the essential requirements you'll need to sell stuff on-line.

So how do you go about entering and updating all this product information?

The Admin Dashboard

Accessing a special web page on your site and entering a username and password will take you to the options part of your eCommerce website. This is commonly known as the Admin Dashboard.

Here, you will be able to update almost every aspect of the website including accessing the product catalog, shipping costs, currency exchange rates, payment gateways, sales reports, etc.

Whichever ecommerce solution you choose from us, we'll set up some or all of your product catalog and make sure that customers can purchase items and that you get paid through a payment gateway (more on that late

The Shop Design

Of course, your shop will need a look and feel to fit in with your business brand.

Again, just like other CMS's a web designer will be needed to develop a theme or template which will transform the default shop-front into whatever design you have in mind for your customers.

Themes can be bought off-the-shelf for both WordPress e-Commerce and Magento and you can apply these yourself, however, you may prefer to have a design exactly the way you imagined it and different from any of your competitors.

Themes are applied to the Administration Dashboard. You may be able to change a few aspects of the theme, such as your logo, background color, text color, however, you're not going to be able to move parts of the theme around to different areas of the screen. A web designer will need to do this by updating the theme's code.

Domain Name and Website Hosting

You will of course need a domain name to trade with and a hosting plan to store the website files and databases.

It's usually best not to purchase a hosting plan until you've spoken to a web designer and they have given you an idea of the best solution to implement.

Many of the cheaper hosting plans that are offered to you when purchasing a domain name, do not support databases or database applications. They may charge an extra setup and yearly fee for setting this up.

So try to avoid buying a hosting plan until you talk to a web designer and have an idea of the type of e-commerce solution you'll need to implement your ideas.

Merchant Bank Accounts vs Business Bank Accounts

Certainly in the UK, you must have a business bank account to legally trade as a business.

Business bank accounts can be used just fine with an eCommerce application but you will need to set up a Payment Gateway service to handle the payment transactions and get the customers money into your bank account.

If you're opening up a business checking account and your account manager knows you are going to be running an eCommerce website you'll be offered an acquirer account which may be a specialized version of the business account.

The merchant account gives you a Merchant ID number and access to a Payment Gateway service that the bank uses or owns.

It's likely you will need to buy the setup of a merchant account and it'll incur fees, usually on a per-transaction basis.

If you've got already set up a merchant account then you'll get to confirm your eCommerce application can support the actual payment gateway your bank has given you access to, otherwise you will not get your money.

e.g. Lloyds TSB uses the Cardnet merchant payment gateway. Royal Bank of Scotland uses the WorldPay merchant payment gateway.

If you were a Royal Bank of Scotland business customer with a merchant account, you'd got to confirm your eCommerce application supported the WorldPay gateway.

You don't get to use the actual merchant account that your business bank offers to trade on-line, but you are doing need a payment gateway of some sort to handle payments.

That leads us nicely onto payment gateways.

Payment Gateways

We've touched on this within the previous section. Essentially, an acquirer account will offer you a payment gateway to use, but you're limited to only the one that your business bank is affiliated with.

A payment gateway may be a service offered by a corporation.

It handles the payment a part of the eCommerce application when a customer proceeds to the checkout to get an item.

The payment gateway collects the purchaser’s details and payment information securely and contacts your business checking account to finish the cash transaction.

This is great for security too as your customer’s banking details aren't kept on your ecommerce website, so that's one less thing to stress about securing.

There are many various payment gateway services with different features and options. As a supplied service all of them charge a fee for his or her use. The fees can include a setup charge and an interesting commission of the entire price of a transaction.

Some payment gateways allow you to pay a monthly or annual fee if your number of transactions is high. this will compute more cost-effective for you if your single transactions are high volume but low individual cost.

You've probably heard of a number of the more documented gateway service providers and not known what they. You've also likely used them without even realizing they're there. a number of the favored payment gateways are:

PayPal, Google Checkout, SagePay, WorldPay, and ChronoPay.

It's great that you simply have a choice and therefore the services are very competitively priced so take a while to see out which is best for your business model. If you would like some help, we'd be happy to satisfy up and walk you thru the choices.

Some payment gateways offer two sorts of general services; hosted and inclusive.

Hosted Payment Gateways

These options usually don't require a set-up or monthly fee, however, transaction costs are often above an inclusive service.

The PayPal Website Payments Standard service may be an exemplar of this.

Essentially, it limits your customers to have a PayPal account (they must register with the PayPal site) and when it involves check-out, the purchasers are transferred from your eCommerce website to the PayPal website for the knowledge gathering and payment transaction, then upon completion redirected back to your eCommerce website.

The downside of this method is basically from a branding point of view. you've got very limited control of how the payment gateway service, PayPal during this case, looks and operates before it redirects back to your website.

Some customers are often postponed by redirecting to a different site as confidence in security is often questioned (although PayPal during this instance features an excellent reputation).

You're also limiting the payment method to only those customers who are willing to use the payment gateway's choice of payment. during this case, the customer must have a registered PayPal account.

A similar process happens if you employ the Google Checkout payment gateway.

So what is the other option?

Inclusive Payment Gateways

Inclusive payment gateways will allow your customers to travel through the entire checkout process without (the appearance of) leaving your branded eCommerce website.

I added in "the appearance of" because in some cases your customers will actually leave your website and use the payment gateway service, however, the way it's implemented and embedded makes it's as if it's all a part of your website and business brand.

So what is the catch?

There's usually a setup fee, a minimum subscription period (say 12 months), a monthly fee, and in fact an entire heap of conditions that apply.

Some particular conditions to seem out for are thresholds on the number of transactions per month, or total monthly funds transferred. Payment gateway services can charge extra or insist you upgrade your service if these thresholds are exceeded during a similar way that mobile companies will charge you additionally if you employ up all of your inclusive talk or SMS time.

The best advantage of using an inclusive payment gateway is that the entire customer experience from browsing to payment is hosted on your own website. this provides the customer with a greater sense of confidence that their data are going to be kept safe and makes your whole business look and feel more professional.

A good example of this sort of service is that the PayPal Web Payments Pro.

Securing the info 

If you're employing a payment gateway then the great news is it's unlikely you will be storing sensitive customer payment details on your eCommerce website.

Those sorts of data are going to be kept securely in your payment gateway account.

Of course, you'll be collecting an entire lot of other important and confidential customer information like name, email, perhaps address, likes, dislikes, a username and password for your site.

All this information must be kept secure and your eCommerce application will help thereupon. The Administration Dashboard will have many sections that control who and what can see parts of the collected data.

But that's not the sole security you will have to believe. does one know what happens once you fill out a form on an internet site and click on submit?

If you've got a glance at the highest of the online browser within the address bar you will see the website's URL address. Most sites will start with http://

(For people who want to understand, URL stands for Uniform Resource Location and HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol)

Any website starting with http:// is transferring data to and from an internet server in Plain Text.

This means, that the online page contents, code, images, text, form data are all sent during a format that's readable to humans. OK, it's going to not be that readable, but in essence, all the knowledge is there in English characters (or whatever language list your website uses).

Now for a few more techie stuff.

When your website is shipped to or received from an internet server, there's not a 1-to-1 direct connection between your website and therefore the server. the online page data is transferred through many networks across different countries and thru thousands of routing computers and other network devices before arriving at your computer.

This means that at any point during its travel, your website data has the potential to be intercepted and skim by whomever.

It isn't much you'll do about the interception part but there's something you'll do to form it a darn lot harder for somebody to read and use your eCommerce website data.

SSL Certificates

Now we're talking.

Let's skip the techie bit and quickly tell you what these are and what they are doing.

You buy an SSL certificate from an internet hosting company (annual renewal most likely), install it into your eCommerce website and it encrypts your website data. Hoorah!

You'll now notice that parts of your website, likely people who require personal form data to be collected and sent, now start with https://

The addition of that tiny "s" letter, standing for "Secure", means the online page data is encrypted when sent and decoded only at the 2 end-points; your computer and an internet server.

Anyone reading the page in between will see garbled non-readable characters.

You may also see additional signs of a secured website like a closed padlock icon.

We would strongly advise you to purchase an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate and obtain this installed and configured to be used together with your hosting account and eCommerce website.

In Summary

Creating an eCommerce website requires a good amount of design.

You'll need an honest web design and web development team to implement your business venture.

It will cost you more and take longer to make than a daily blog or brochure-ware website due to all the planning and setup.

You'll make money - and that is what's it's all about in any case ...

We hope this helps you begin your eCommerce website journey. in fact, there is a heap of things we just did not have the time to hide.

You get more details to visit https://uniteddigihub.com/.