In this article you will find out the reason why doing Ecommerce can create another revenue steam for your business, and two areas that you need to pay attention to when you are doing Ecommerce. First of all, we are going to talk about two benefits of doing Ecommerce. Secondly, we talk about how you should design your website to help your visitors to use your website. Finally, we talk about how you should handle payment gateway problem.
Benefits of Doing Ecommerce
If you have already had a business but you do not have any strategy on putting your business online, chances are you have already lost a lot of opportunities already. When businesses have an Ecommerce strategy, they are already exposed to billions of people who go online every day. If a person wants to find information about particular business, the first step is to go to your website directly. If you do not have a website, they will search about the product or service you offered. Those people may buy from your competitors who can provide the same product and service as yours. So if you cannot be found online, you have already lost a lot of businesses.
The cost of running an Ecommerce website is also very low compared to having a physical business location. You need to pay for electricity, water or other stuff that may not directly contribute to your business. However, the cost of running an Ecommerce website includes paying for website hosting, website design, and probably payment gateway only. The cost is usually less than that of running a business with physical location.
How to design your Ecommerce website?
Most of the time you can use existing content management system to create your Ecommerce website nicely in a very short period of time. If you really want to modify your website, there are two things you need to pay attention to.
First is the placement of your ad. You would not want to place an ad that will block your visitors from viewing your site. There are two places to put your ad. The first one is on the top right hand corner, and the second one is on the right hand side of your page. Some websites will create four square places that are specifically for advertising purpose. It is very nice and will not block visitors from viewing your site.
Navigation is another key element you need to pay attention to. It has to be clear and easy to be used to look for certain products by your visitors. Usually you just need to group your products properly under certain product categories.
About Payment Gateway
Payment gateway is a system that Ecommerce websites use to accept payment from visitors. Most of the time people will pay by their credit card. However, it is very complicated to build a credit card processing system in the website from scratch. Therefore some companies create their own payment gateway. Website owner just needs to follow the instruction from those companies and put the payment handling code in the website. By doing so website owners do not need to handle the payment process themselves. PayPal and 2CheckOut are two very common payment gateway service providers you can trust. If you really need to have your own credit card handling process, you can ask your website hosting company and see if they have any merchant account service for you.