Custom Search

E-Commerce Website

Creating an E-commerce website is only slightly more complicated than creating any other kind of site and their 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.

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.

Shopping Cart Systems

Most web hosting companies offer some type of shopping cart solution that you can implement on your e-commerce website. Some of these are included and 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.

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.

How to Link to This Page

To link to this page from your website, simply cut and paste the following code to your web page.

It will appear on your page as:

Create an E-Commerce Website

All Other Guides and Tutorials

Create a Great Website
The Create a Great Website Blog...

Build a Website - Getting Started
Build a Website - Getting Started will guide you through the steps necessary to build an effective Website that accomplishes your objectives.

Website Objectives
Knowing your Website objectives is the first step to designing and building a great Website. Beginning with the end in mind and defining your objectives, you'll be able to work backwards and create the information and resources you'll need on your site.

Website Topics
You may know exactly what Web site topics you want to write about, but for a money making site, choosing a Web site topic can be one of the most important decisions you make

Website Host
Website host - Getting Space on the Web. This tutorial will teach you what you need to know about selecting a Website host.

Infolinks In-Text Advertising
This article explains how website publishers and bloggers can make money from their websites by using Infolinks In-text advertising links.

Create a Great Website - The Best Way to Get to the Top of Google!
Choosing your website niche is one of the most important decisions you'll make and it will have a huge impact on your ability to make money with your website.

Online Courses
Online courses from Create-a-great-website!

Create a Great Website Blog
Create a Great Website Blog

E-Commerce Website
Information and resource for creating an e-commerce website.

This site proudly build with Site Build It!

Create A Great Website Logo