Ecommerce

online shop website designSo, you have finally decided to open an online store and be the boss of yourself. You are tired of people telling you what to do next and want the pleasure of having a personal business. That is just excellent and we really appreciate your courage but do you know that hundreds of people make online store websites and fail? They have great products at competitive prices but still they get no visitors or no sale and eventually they close the site and start looking over for jobs?

You can save yourself from the embarrassment and know what it takes to make a competitive online store website that can sell products and earn you some real money.

The first thing you have to do is decide what products you want to sell in an online store. Are they electronics or clothes or pet supplies? There is a huge list of things you can sell, so make up your mind as your online store website design depends on it.

If you have decided to make an online store and sell pet products and supplies, then do you know which design is perfect for you or which color scheme should you use. If you are confused and unsure then seek professional help. There are hundreds of web designers that can make you smart, elegant yet professional websites at good rates. An online store website requires a number of things.

Shopping Cart

First, it needs categories and products and then there is a need of a checkout cart and how people can make payments. A client testimonial page or reviews given at a column at the main page also look nice and give people the feeling of trust. If it is pet supplies you are selling, then some pictures of really cute pets in the design or in columns or headers will do excellent as your customers would be pet lovers.

Since you will be making a new online store, make sure that your web design includes a special offer page where people can take advantage of new offers and deals or first time buying discounts.

There should be a page which tells comprehensively about the shipping charges as many visitors tend to just leave and not ask through email what the charges are.

Make sure that the web design which you want to use for your online store is not too flashy. Too bright or flashy sites also tend to bore the visitors and it seems that you are not too serious about work. A good example when making an online store is to see different categories of www.amazon.com since they have an excellent site and have millions and millions of satisfied customers throughout the world.

Our website designers will put the greatest care into every step of the process, we have even employed a professional photographer to do the product photography.

 

I ask myself whenever im surfing online, "How much money does this website make".

You have to look at a few things:

  1. The amount of Traffic/Visitors.
  2. What are the possible money making aspects like:
    1. Are there adverts all over the place?
    2. What products / services are being offered?
    3. Is there a shopping cart feature?
  3. The website's design and usability.

Amount of Traffic / Visitors

So, to check the traffic you can go checkout Alexa.com, they track websites by inticing people to install their toolbar onto your browser. This anonymously tracks all the sites you goto and sends the results to Alexa for their stats. Get your website designers to check regularly and send you reports on the alexa data. Alexa makes a ton of money by selling off the stats to various interesting companies. They also display some interesting things like "Hot URLS" and "Compare Traffic between websites".

Money Making Aspects

Adverts

If a website is running adverts like "Google Ads" (Adsense), you can sort of work out their revenue based on how competitive their 'website theme' is. For eg. "Homeloans" will pay from R6 right up to R35 PER CLICK!!! and then of course there is the hot topic of "Swine Flu" you will get paid around R0.50 - R2.50 per click. But obviously swine flu will get A LOT more traffic.

Google pays well for topics that people are willing to pay to advertise on.

Products / Services

Is the site selling it's own products and services, or is it just and affiliate site that generates leads and clicks for other companies who actually sell the products and provice the services listed on the website. Revenue share varies depending on thsi factor.

A Shopping Cart

This ties in to the "Products / Services" topic, if they have a shopping cart with a checkout, does not neccesarilly mean that they offer the products listed. A lot of sites get a data-feed which displays thousands of products. The key determining factor is whether or not the shopping cart is redirected to "Amazon" or such websites.

Website's design and usability

This is something you can read about here "planning-a-usable-website-a-three-step-guide.html"

Go check out Alexa.com's hot urls:

Hot Urls

The hottest pages on the web right now... according to the Alexa Toolbar.

  1. Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20090805/sc_space/speedingstarsconfirmbizarrenatur...

  2. stealing noms - My soup

    http://joshhaley.soup.io/post/24685971/stealing-noms

  3. It's SO over: cool cyberkids abandon social networking sites

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/young-abandon-social-networking-site...

  4. J.R. Smith shuts down Twitter account amid controversy

    http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/J-R-Smith-shuts-down-Twitter...

  5. After 34 years, Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme to be released

    http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/05/squeaky.fromme.release/index.html