Planning your e-commerce website

There are many factors that are required in order for you to trade successfully online:

• The first stage is to decide the products or services you would like to sell.
• Establish if your products are going to be found and sort after on the Internet. Niche products often sell very successfully on-line.
• Market research is key... If you are wanting to setup an online book store, what is you point of difference and how are you going to compete with Amazon?
• You then need to contract a website designer to specify an updateable ecommerce website, to enable you to add products or services as you launch new lines.
• Discuss with you web designer exactly what you want the store to acheive. e/g do your require stock control? Would you like you customers to track orders?
• After realising your requirements, you then need to look at budget. Your budget will establish what development components can be completed now and what requirements will need adding on at a later date.
• Either you or your chosen web designer will need to establish a suitable payment gateway. At BeVivid we help guide you through the process of choosing and setting up a payment gateway. This may mean obtaining a merchant id from your current bank.
• To speed the process of setting up your online shop, it is highly recommended that you create a spreadsheet of the products you wish to sell. Your chosen web designer can guide you in this process.
• Product photography is key to selling your products online. Shoppers rely heavily on good product photography to choose a product to purchase.
• Your website can then start production. A usual e-commerce development takes around 8 weeks.
• On completion your website will require a week of stringent testing, by both yourself and your web developer. This is essential to ensure your development operates exactly as you require and prices and product images are correct.
• Your website can now be launched.
• You then have to look at different online and offline marketing so customers can find your new website and products. Will you launch the store with a 3 month Google Adwords campaign, or wait for the search engines to pick your pages up normally.

If you would like more information or have any questions about planning your e-commerce website contact our sales team at sales@bevivid.co.uk

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