Internet is the opportunity. Any one can create new business in Internet if you have ideas and passion. To make your business visible and heard, your website is the first recommendable tool. If you sell products and services, you need to have an e-commerce site.

E-commerce web site design is nothing different than a traditional web design, but requires a few more extra functionalities and components to handle financial transactions. For those additional services, you will have to rely on third parties. Many startups are intimidated by the process and they do not build web sites that are capable of e-commerce transactions. I am trying to give you just a brief idea of what it takes to design e-commerce sites. I will write different aspects of online business in my future posts. Suggest you to study some of the these aspects of e-commerce site development before you start.
This will help you understand how e-commerce site development differs from regular web site development, and will also help you to build web sites that accomplish desired purpose.

Transaction Security

One of the most important aspects of e-commerce web site design is security that creates confidence in consumers doing online transactions. You need to make sure that your visitors can safely and securely input their personal details, credit card information and shipping information into your online payment system. To build web sites that are secure, you will need to protect pages with the encryption of Secure Socket Layer (SSL). SSL encrypts the information transferred from your page to the web server and other servers like payment processing server and merchant bank servers.

You can get installed SSL certificate for your e-commerce websites through your website host. There are many digital certificate providers. Most popular and trusted providers are Verisign and and Thawte.

Payment Gateway

To build web sites that accept online payments, you will need to incorporate payment gateway services for processing credit/debit cards into your ecommerce web site design. Payment Gateways are connected with your bank through your merchant accounts in those banks. All financial transactions should go through payment gateway for validation and authentication of the cards and secured transactions before payment is deposited to your merchant account. Payment Gateways charge a small percentage of transaction fee and fee for fund transfer. You can choose to accept various credit cards, and other online payment methods like PayPal, Verisign, Authorizenet, 2checkout, WorldPay etc. This is something that should be arranged early in the site development process so that you can begin doing business immediately once your site has launched. Acquirring payment gateway account, integrating the feature into your e-commerce site and testing the transactions may some time, even sometime frustrating in coordination and communication with different providers. So plan ahead for this.

Look and feel

Aesthetics is another important aspect of e-commerce web site success. It helps to make your visitors spend their time in your site. Competition is so fierce on the Internet. If you want to build web sites that stand out from the crowd, they must be aesthetically appealing. A beautiful site with clean and crisp layout will be more likely to draw customers, and is much more likely to encourage repeat customers than a site that has been poorly developed. To get an idea of what looks good and what doesn’t, you should visit competing and non-competing e-commerce sites around the web.

Software and Applications

There are many different software products and e-commerce applications that can be purchased and even available in the for of free and open source software to help you with your e-commerce web site design and run your online business. Some of these tools and frameworks will be helpful when you build web sites, and others will be helpful when you have launched the site and want to track orders, monitor your inventory, or enable features like payment processing and email auto-alerts.

Hire the professionals

If you want to build websites that are e-commerce ready, but don’t have the e-commerce web site design experience needed to accomplish the task, you can hire an e-commerce web site design professional to help you with the trickier portions of site development. With a minimal amount of help from you, a professional designer can build web sites that are visually appealing and then incorporate the features you need to complete e-commerce transactions.

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