eTail Central Does eCommerce Web Site Design

Web Site Design for eCommerce

The term eCommerce has come into widespread use to mean electronic commerce (business transactions) conducted over the internet. This includes a range of business activities, but the one that eTail Central is concerned with is retail selling online where the buyer pays by credit card into the seller's merchant account.

Should you sell your products over the internet? It may be a good additional marketing channel bringing new sales from around the world - but it may not be a good idea if for instance your product can't be easily delivered over long distances. Your website can be accessed from anywhere in the world, so you will need to be prepared to handle the freight costs, customs proceedures, credit card transactions and exchange rate issues that come with international sales.

Selling something either offline or online is a process of making your potential customers aware of you and attracting them to your store - to build the visitor's confidence and get them to consider purchasing from you by differentiating your shop from the competition. You must demonstrate a good price/value relationship - and convince the customer that you would be the best shop to buy from. Not all visitors will be prepared to make the buying decision when they first visit your store, so you have to offer free information and perhaps other services in order to give these visitors a reason to come back, perhaps to buy.

Any business depends on a commercially viable product together with an economical, dependable way to deliver the product to the customer. If this isn't dependably so the result will be dis-satisfied customers and loss of confidence on the part of the merchant.

In the last ten years growth in the use of the internet for marketing has been dramatic. But even so the offline shops have a distinct feature of having social and entertainment value that attracts people, as well as the very real advantages that you can touch and feel the products and take delivery immediately. So the online shop must be designed to offer advantages that outweigh these differences.

One of the things that is much easier with an online shop compared with the offline one is the ease of adapting to change to fit the changing market or new opportunities. And it's important that the website is as open-ended as possible so change need not result in a major re-design of the website. Another aspect of the same problem is the not knowing how successful the online store will be - you need to be able to handle success, and conversely not go broke if it is only moderately successful.

One of the big differences with internet marketing is that the customer is seeking information – it is possible to design websites that establish an "authority" image in the eyes of the customer that might lead to preferential supplier status when the customer is ready to buy. Internet marketing targets a different demographic profile to that of offline marketing – internet users tend to be young, high-income males – although this is changing fairly quickly.

Internet marketing co-exists with offline promotion techniques – offline techniques can be used to capture new online visitors eg. magazine advertisements. Important factors specific to online marleting include search engines and links from other sites, and it is important for marketers to understand how customers are likely to become aware of their website.

For instance, link popularity (number and quality of links pointing to a website) is an important factor in determining the success of a website, as this is a most influential factor in determining how a website performs in search engine ranking.

It is important to develop a clear overall marketing strategy and to integrate internet marketing into the total strategy – online marketing is a part of overall marketing – it shares the scope and objectives of the overall marketing program as well as any branding, technical or legal constraints.

Security is important in for any business, online or offline. Customers need to be able to trust the merchant to both supply merchantable quality goods and to deal honestly with the customer's payments and particularly that the merchant account is secure. The merchant in turn needs to be able to trust the customer - for instance in the online case, not to make illegal charge-backs.

Performance is an important aspect of website design - web pages that are slow to load cause impatience and irritation which ultimately translates into poor sales and low numbers of return visits.

Like any business equipment, the eCommerce website must operate consistently and reliably. If it is reliable then there is scope for cost reduction, but if the online shop is unavailable at the moment a potential customer visits this will lower perceptions and invariably visitors will go elsewhere to find whatever it was they were looking for.