What Every E-Commerce Site Needs to Succeed

If you’re new to the scene, creating an e-commerce site can be confusing and your business deserves to start off on solid footing. To help you understand what it takes to reach your goals in the digital marketplace, we’re explaining the basic components that every e-commerce site needs to succeed!

First, here are some things to consider when creating your site:

Your website is just as important as your storefront.

Your website might be even more important than your physical storefront. After all, when you’re researching your next buy, what is the first thing you do? Most people pull out their phone or computer and do a Google search. Which means your potential lead’s first impression is online and you know what they say about first impressions. For the same reasons you keep your physical storefront clean, hire friendly people, decorate, and organize the floor to guide buyers to the right areas, you have to do the same for your website.

Know your pitch.

Just like marketing campaigns in any medium, you should spend time working out your “pitch” – the way you plan to approach your customers or clients. We do this for our clients by getting to know our clients, their products, and their customers, then crafting a brand story. Once you have the story, then we start creating conversion paths. This process takes into consideration where you user enters your site, what they want to do, and then we create and encourage users to take the easiest, most logical path to accomplish what they want to do.

Your customers want to know you.

Don’t be afraid to tell your users about your company. Especially if you aren’t a well known brand, customers will want to do their research on you to make sure you’re a trustworthy company. Now, they might not call it “researching your trustworthiness,” but at the very least, they are looking for signs that you are not a scam artist. Being open and honest with them goes a long way to build trust.

Next, let’s get technical. The following outline some of the foundational elements that you have to have in place to run a store online.

A merchant account

To take credit and debit purchases through your website, you have to have a merchant account. You can open a merchant account with a bank (called an “acquiring bank”) or a third party, such as PayPal. As fair warning, there are fees associated with the ability to accept credit and debit card payments to your merchant account that vary by acquiring bank. Be sure to do your homework when choosing yours!

Payment gateway

In order to process credit and debit card purchases, you will also need a payment gateway. Gateways are like your website’s version of a traditional retail sales terminal where customers swipe their card. It is what connects your customers’ transaction information to your acquiring bank so that they, in conjunction with the credit card association and your customer’s own bank, can authorize and process the payment and deliver the funds to your merchant account.

Privacy policy and terms of use

These are legal documents, located usually in the footer of your website, that outlines for your customers how you plan to gather, use, disclose, and manage your customers’ data. It’s a pretty smart idea to also include your store policies on purchases, returns, refunds, and the like. You can find examples online or draft one with the help of legal professionals who understand the applicable laws of the countries in which you are doing business.

SSL

Short for “Secure Sockets Layer,” an SSL encrypts the data you have to send on the web. For example, when a customer enters in their credit card information, an SSL protects the information by encrypting it, while the website sends the information to the gateway to be processed. There are a variety of different SSL providers and options.

Hosting

Every website needs hosting, e-commerce or otherwise. Web hosts provide servers where you keep and manage the files you use for your website and connects the files to the internet for use in web site creation. Think about it like renting a space on the internet. Just like an SSL and merchant accounts, you can purchase hosting services from a number of sources that offer a variety of benefits depending on how complicated your site is and how much of the site management you want to do yourself.

Final thoughts

There’s still plenty of things to consider ranging from shipping policies, customer service, product organization, and of course all of the bells and whistles that could help you sell your products. That said, getting the above in place gives you the foundational elements for building the e-commerce side of your new site. If you’d like more information on how Rise can help you build the e-commerce site of your dreams, do not hesitate to contact us. We love talking about this stuff.