How Do I Start an Ecommerce Business? | You can start an online business.
Whether you are a professional or just getting started follow these easy steps listed here.
1. Step 1: Decide on a name for your online store and your website domain name.
2. Step 2: Sign-up for a website hosting plan.
3. Step 3: Create a detailed summary outline of your ecommerce requirements.
4. Step 4: Decide how you are going to ship or deliver your products to consumers.
5. Step 5: Outline your product categories and product details.
When you set up your ecommerce site you will need to acquire the following.
a. Merchant Gateway account – This will allow you to accept credit cards online. Popular merchant gateways include Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, Intuit Payments, First Data ‘Ezy Pay’ and many others.
b. SSL Certificate – An SSL will keep you ecommerce website pages secure. Popular SSL providers include; Trustwave, Comodo and VeriSign. An SSL can be acquire through your website hosting company.
c. Shipping Calculator – If you plan on shipping products yourself you need to sign-up for a shipper account such as UPS, FedEx or USPS.
Send your ecommerce website plan to several reputable web design companies in your area. Depending on how fast and how they respond is an indicator of how much attention and success your new ecommerce website will have.
Approach your analysis for bids and pricing using the following method.
– Throw out the low-ball bids. This is a good indicator the work will be less than professional.
– Throw out the high-end bids. This is a good indicator they are tempting to take advantage of you.
– Accept and serious consider bids that are within a few hundred dollars north or south. These will be true fair market prices from reputable website companies.
At VISIONEFX we suggest you check to see if the web design companies you are considering hiring have online reviews and references. Finally take a look at their website portfolio to determine if they have clients with live websites that reflect the look and feel of what you are looking for.
Also see: Ecommerce 101
About VISIONEFX
We are a professional web design company based in Virginia Beach VA. We understand that great design elevates web sites above the rest and work to provide you the very best in web design. VISIONEFX provides services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States.
