e-Commerce Websites
Your e-Commerce Website is what will carry your product to the entire world with just a few clicks. You want this website to truly represent you and your brand well to have the best chance of making a sale online. With the right graphics and easy-to-manage admin interface, we can highlight your product and begin selling to more than just your friends and family.
The benefits of an e-commerce website are many. With the right sales and distribution system in place, you can pretty easily set it and forget it. Obviously things will need to be updated, but a steady stream of income can be generated from a well-designed, search-engine-friendly e-commerce website.
e-Commerce Compared to Regular Websites
The difference between a product-based website and an information-based website is substantial. From the layout to the coding, an e-commerce website requires many more pieces to work together.
Page Templates
Malechi Tech likes to have use three main templates when building a product-based site -- the home page, the category page and the product page.
- Home Page Template
The home page will have all the standard navigation, but it will highlight specific products that need to be moved out of inventory or sold for business purposes. A shoe store might highlight a new pair of slippers during prom season or a sports store might feature a new compound bow just before bow hunting season. The home page is also the place to have a video introduction of the company and products to really pull the website visitor in and peak their interest.
Other uses of the home page template are showcasing products that the visitor might have viewed in the past or related products that visitor might be interested in.
The more important products (higher margin) have large, hi-res images at the top of the page and related items have smaller images toward the bottom. - Category Page Template
The category page is pretty self explanatory. All the products in a specific category are listed on this page. Some products may overlap, but good database design will limit these occurrences. Usually, the category pages lists smaller product images and a brief description of the item. It also has a medium level call to action to get the customer to add it to a shopping cart or click to view the larger image. - Product Page Template
A product page template needs to have the most detailed level of information about that specific product. The price and any discounts needs to be included, as well as options and features that the user can choose to include or exclude for that product.
Because there can be so much information about a product, I like to use a tabbed navigation box within the product page like this.
Product Images
The most important piece of a product website is the presentation of the product. The site and navigation are part of this, but you MUST have good pictures to be competitive in your niche. Find a great portrait / product photographer and make sure that the license agreements states that you either own the images outright or you can use the images online for unlimited distribution for commercial purposes.
Malechi Tech can connect you with a great photographer or you can use your own contacts, but unless you have express permission to use public images from vendors or ones you find online, take the time to get professional images of your product.
Solid Database
With an e-commerce site, it's vital that you have a strong database structure. Most of the time, you don't have to create this from scratch, but you need to make sure you use a service that is reputable and has been around for a while. Otherwise, you're likely to find some glitches in the software and regret spending all that time and energy into creating the store.
Hosted, Partially Integrated, or Fully Integrated
Your shopping cart is likely to cost you some money on a monthly or per-transaction basis. So consider how much you can make selling your stuff online before you commit to $100/month in hosting fees. We're working on a review of shopping carts, but until that's up, just consider these things for now.
Hosted Shopping Cart - This means you pay monthly for a solution that is already online. There's nothing to download and you keep track of everything through the website you're selling on. Sounds great, right? No so much. While there are many benefits, make sure you weigh the negatives. What happens if the site shuts down? Do you lose all your data and are you forced to start from scratch? Can you export your database and back it up regularly for free? How much do you have to pay monthly above and beyond the transaction fees and the credit card fees? Some solutions are free, but make sure you know what you're getting into. Look at Shopify, Weebly and Etsy.
It can get expensive very quickly.
Partially Integrated Shopping Cart - Paypal is an example of a partially integrated shopping cart. This means that you plug in some HTML into your website and when the user clicks on the link to check out, they leave your site and go to the shopping cart site.
The benefit to this is that you have very little time and effort required, but you do need to know some HTML and CSS if you want to make the button at all custom. You also have tons of flexibility with how you place the button on your site and you don't pay a monthly fee, typically, outside of the transaction and credit card fees.
The down side is that your customer leaves your site and the user-experience is interrupted between your site's look and feel and the shopping cart's look and feel. There are some ways to customize the shopping cart's images, but it's very limited.
Fully Integrated Shopping Cart - Fully integrated shopping carts offer you the ability to tweak everything down to the last detail, and maintain the cart on your own website so you are in full control. This means, however, that you've got a much bigger investment up front to customize the site just the way you want it. Magento is one of the more popular options, but it takes the right people to put it in place. If you have a very high margin product, and you can really focus on SEO, then a fully integrated shopping cart will be worth the up-front investment.
