In this day and age almost every business has an online presence and many times it is the sole presence of a business. There are more and more online businesses that are strictly online. The Internet provides a great way to reach millions and millions of prospective customers. Many online marketing tools and techniques cost little or no money.
The one thing you can rely on is having a lot of competition. Unless you have a business that fills a niche that no one else has ever filled, you will have your work cut out for you. You have to somehow figure out how to make customers see you differently and draw them to you. By doing certain things like choosing your domain name very carefully, building an appealing and user friendly site, increase your search engine placement and Page Rank you can help yourself with making your online presence prominent.
So what do you need? Here is a brief check list of some basic steps you need to have an ecommerce website.
- Register a domain name – try to pick a name that uses your business name or clarifies what you offer. It is always best if the name is as short as possible and is catchy so that customers remember it.
- Obtain ecommerce friendly web hosting – this can be had for a very reasonable price. You need to make sure that if you sell goods, the web hosting company can meet your needs for an online store presence and that all information is secure so that your customers know they can trust you with their transactions. It only takes one glitch in security to cause bad word of mouth that no business can afford.
- If you do sell products online you need to make sure that you have shopping cart software that integrates with your hosting. You need a payment gateway and merchant account so that you can accept online payments of all kinds. You need SSL – Secure Socket Layers that encrypt information for security reasons. You will need to track your items and have some sort of software to help you stay organized.
Ecommerce can be a very satisfying and lucrative adventure. Choosing the right companies to go with can be key! We have a few suggestions for you:
Domain name registration: GoDaddy
Ecommerce website: ix Web Hosting
Shopping Cart: Yahoo! Shopping Cart
Payment gateway: Authorize.net
Merchant account: Charge.com