Basics to start an e-Commerce website

1. Web Hosting Service – A hosting server gives your website a place to reside on the Internet; without a hosting service, visitors cannot access your website. Most hosting services are available for a nominal monthly fee. Make sure the hosting service is compatible with your shopping cart software.

2. Website – Once you have place for your website online, next is the website itself. There are a myriad of available options when it comes to creating your website. If you already have an existing website, you can integrate e-commerce capabilities. If you are building the website from scratch, there are a handful of software programs that can help you build a website with no HTML skills or you can have your site designed by a website design professional or firm (typically the most expensive alternative).

3. Shopping Cart Software – In order for your customers to actually choose which products or services they want to purchase from your site, you need shopping cart software. Look for software that offers merchant tools, supports a myriad of payment options, shipping and taxes configurations, real-time statistics and reporting, and security features.

4. A Merchant Account – Available through conventional banks and financial institutions, merchant accounts allow a business to accept credit cards as payment. A merchant account is essentially a contract between the merchant and the bank and outlines how transactions will transpire.

5. Online Payment Services – In addition to a merchant account, you will also need payment services (also known as a payment gateway). This allows you to actually process payments and determines whether or not a customer’s credit card is accepted or declined.

6. Online Marketing – Your website is worthless if you don’t have any people visiting it. Be sure to market your website by engaging in the various search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that can help jumpstart your website’s rankings in the major search engines and attract more site visitors and even hand out business cards if needed. I’ll post about search engine optimization for e-commerce sites soon!