Building your ecommerce website in 5 easy steps

Going online in these troubled times is a consideration that many business owners are seriously thinking about. With an online shop or website, you can take your business to the next level and help your business stay afloat and even thrive during the current pandemic. 

But how do you start your online shop? 

What are the steps you need to follow to achieve this goal? Keep reading for 5 easy steps to creating your ecommerce website!

1. Choose a domain name and ensure it’s available

The domain name is the name of your website. It is how your customers will find you. However, your first step in approaching your domain name would be to ensure that it’s available for use.

There are several online tools that can help you check if your domain has been used up. For example, whois.net is very simple to use.

Why do we make this suggestion first?

Because if you’ve invested a lot of time into promoting your products only to find that your domain name isn’t available, you’ll lose out on precious resources. 

2. Determine the search volume for your products

The principles of supply and demand in economics come into play in this step. Irrespective of what you’re trying to sell, if there’s no demand for it, you’re less likely to make any sales, no matter how great your product is.

This is why it’s important to spend some time determining the search volume of your products as they appear on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo (amongst others). Search volume is an indication of how much demand there is for your product.

If the search volume is low, the chances are that there’s a low demand for your goods/services. Conversely, if the search volume is high, you stand a higher chance of reaching a bigger audience and ultimately selling more of your wares.

3. Do your SEO-related research

SEO – or search engine optimisation – is a strategy that, if effectively used and applied, will see you ranking high on search engines’ first pages. Let’s face it, hardly anyone who searches for something online goes past the first page and your page-one ranking is vital for your business.

Here, you will need to do research into your business-related keywords and create appropriate copy that utilises these keywords and incorporates them in your copy.

This will make it much easier for your customers to find you and ultimately help you make the next sale.

4. Build your site

Now, after you’ve done some research into your online business project, is the time for you to purchase your domain name and start building your website.

There are various online resources that can help you create it. Ultimately, you’ll need to consider your budget for creating your website from scratch as well as design elements, photography and your copy when building it as you consider incorporating information that will be valuable to your customers.

To ease the development process, you can choose ready to use or semi-ready to use solutions such as WordPress together with WooCommerce, PrestaShop, OpenCart, GombaShop, CloudCart, XCart, Magento or any other shopping cart platform.

Some of these eCommerce platforms offer premade templates which you can use to start your business in no-time.

5. Choose shopping cart plugins for seamless payments acceptance

And finally, payments! These are the backbone to your business and you’ll need to integrate shopping cart software in your ecommerce website so that you’re able to accept payments seamlessly.

Luckily, with myPOS, we work with some of the most popular shopping cart plugins which you can use for your site, as the ones mentioned above.

There’s no need for any further or complex integrational work, or the need for additional (and expensive) hardware and software. We’ve done all the integrational hard work for you to enable you to accept payments seamlessly.

Take your business online

No one is certain how long COVID-19 will be with us for. One factor that is definitely known is that small and medium sized businesses will be affected.

Now is the perfect time to take your business online to help you continue offering your products and services to your customers. Starting your website is not a difficult endeavour and we hope that with this blog post, we’ve made the road to doing so easier and clearer.