How to Develop an eCommerce Web Site
You probably visit popular eCommerce websites all the time, like Amazon, Overstock and Ebay, but you never knew exactly how they came to be. It's actually pretty straightforward once you know what you're doing. You can set up your own eCommerce web site with products for sale to the world in a matter of a day with just a few simple steps.
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Things You'll Need
- Domain name
- Hosting account
- Merchant account (suggestion below)
- Shopping cart program
Instructions
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1
Purchase a domain name and web hosting account. This is not a large investment---some web hosts charge only a couple of dollars per month, including the domain fee; and some, like DotEasy, charge you only a small flat fee ($25) for a small, basic website with the domain name included (see Resources below).
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Sign up for a PayPal Account for businesses. PayPal allows you to sign up for a merchant account with no upfront fee (just pay a transaction fee of up to 2.9% plus 30 cents for each purchase made on your site). You also get access to special features you need to set up your eCommerce site and a shopping cart system at no additional charge. (You can also sign up for an individual merchant account to accept credit cards from your online customers, but keep in mind that you will have to pay an upfront fee for a virtual terminal, pay monthly statement and gateway fees, and learn how to install a shopping cart on your hosting account. If you are just starting out with eCommerce websites, it's best that you start off with PayPal.)
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3
Decide on the page names for your site. Since this will most likely be a site selling multiple products and services, you might want to name the pages of your site by category. For example, if you're selling shoes, you can categorize your pages as men's shoes, women's shoes, kid's shoes, pumps, flip-flops and so on. Then add an about and contact page to connect with your customers and, of course, your homepage.
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Sign up for a third-party shopping cart system. (see Resources below for a list of shopping carts that are compatible with PayPal.)
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List all the products that you want to sell in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The columns for each product can vary, but you definitely at least need to include a column for the item number, product name, the location of the picture for the product and price. Upload this list to your online shopping cart per the instructions of the shopping cart system you chose.
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Use PayPal's Website Payments Standards tool to integrate your shopping cart items with your PayPal account. When finished, the products will appear side by side in your category pages with PayPal links underneath.
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Tips & Warnings
Yahoo! Stores is another very popular way to set up an eCommerce website online.
If you start off with a small website, be careful not to go over the bandwidth, which is the total amount of downloads (including text, images and other items) allowed on your website by customers. If you do, you may be charged additional fees by your hosting account service. So be sure you have more than enough bandwidth to accommodate the traffic that you expect your small site will receive over the next year.
Resources
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Comments
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I see here the opportunity to have exactly what I have always desired e.g. an Ecommerce website, but so far I had five websites. Four with Go Dadddy through a third party and one with Verizon as a business. So far all five websites have become inactive without my knowledge or permission. Where am I supposed to go from here?
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Please it should be very helpful if did add links to textbooks (i.e do-it-yourself texts) on this subject.
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nikhilgarg21
Jul 04, 2010
Information here is very helpful thanks... -
lucy1015
Jun 25, 2009
This is very helpful information..thank you 5*s
