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E-Commerce Website
Creating an E-commerce website is a little more complicated than creating any other kind of site, but there are lots of tools available to help you do it.
If you have products to sell or you want to sell things from your website, then you'll need a shopping cart system to take orders and payments. Your website acts as the front door to your online store. You'll have many shoppers and browsers and the purpose of your e-commerce website is to convert them to paying customers.
It used to be almost impossible for an individual to accept a credit card for payment online. Fortunately this is now much simpler and there are several options for setting up a shopping cart.
You can also use PayPal to accept credit card payments on your website.
Your website should be designed so that it leads the visitor through the sales process. Like any other page on your site, you want to use text and keywords to attract search engines as well as to provide information for prospective customers.
The copy you use should't just inform the visitor, it needs to actively sell to the site visitor.
Shopping Cart Systems
Choosing the best shopping cart system to launch your e-commerce website business is critical to its success.
Most web hosting companies offer some type of shopping cart solution that you can implement on your e-commerce website. Some of these, mostly open-source solutionss are free and are included in your hosting package, but others require an additional purchase as an add-on to your website.
For example, Bluehost.com has eight different shopping cart programs that can be installed on your site including ShopSite, Marketecture, Magento, ZenCart, OSCommerce, CubeCart, and AgoraCart and that’s just a sample of the e-commerce shopping cart programs available. You'll find more helpful information the Choosing the Right E-Commerce Shopping Cart page.
Taking Credit Card Payments Online
In order to take credit card payments online, you can use an existing third party system like PayPal which is very convenient for both the buyer and seller, or set up your own merchant account.
I've used PayPal on one of my sites with great success. It's easy to set up and it doesn’t cost as much as many other merchant services. Also with PayPal, you only pay for the service when one of your customers uses a credit card or PayPal account to send you money.
If you decide to use PayPal you can integrate it with many of the shopping cart systems from BlueHost and other hosting companies.
Using PayPal Merchant Services
PayPal offers several ways to take payments from customers and they're listed in the Merchant Services area of PayPal. They have a WebSite Payments Standard package and WebSite Payments Pro solution too.
PayPal also provides a free guide to help you figure out the best way to accept payments online. Check out PayPal's Merchant Services site and look for the free guide, Online Payment Processing: What You Need To Know.
Getting Traffic to An E-Commerce Website
There are many forms for an e-commerce website, but if you're just selling products on your site, it will be difficult for you to get listed in the search engines. If you can't get organic (free search engine traffic) to your website, you'll have to advertise which will drive up your expenses.
The best small e-commerce sites are ones that are a part of a website that has great content in addition to related products. It's the same principle as affiliate marketing except that instead of sending your visitor to your affiliate to buy a product, you're sending them to your own store.
It's the great content that gets you found by the search engines. You can leverage that traffic for your e-commerce store.
For example, I'm still building my old-woodworking-tools.net website. I'm attracting good traffic to the site because it has a lot of good content about woodworking tools.
I earn income from AdSense and affiliate marketing, but now that I have the traffic, my next step is to set up a store so I can sell products related to the content.
A Word of Caution...
Setting up an e-commerce website is probably not for the newbie to the Web unless you have some good technical help. Setting up a shopping card with the associated payment system and gateway can be complicated and it may require some regular maintenance if something goes wrong.
Your web host won’t be able to set up everything for you and if they do, they’re going to charge you extra for the service.
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