eCommerce Website Development: The Definitive Guide
Not only does a well-designed eCommerce site look nice, but it also works well. If you do it right, it will lead to real sales and profits. No matter the size of your business, eCommerce success can make the order process easier for your customers. It also helps build brand loyalty, which will grow your company. Knowing the ins and outs of eCommerce website development is extremely important in this day and age.
Here, we’ll show you how to make a proper eCommerce website and what you need to do to start your own online business, from branding to shipping. Let’s dive in!
What Is eCommerce Website Development?
eCommerce stands for electronic commerce. It refers to buying and selling products or even services over the Internet. Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, and Etsy are considered outstanding eCommerce platforms for both individual customers and business clients.
So, when it comes to eCommerce website development, we often think of steps, tools, and skills needed to craft an eCommerce site. This involves developing front-end and back-end features, like check-out systems, payment processing, and site security.
Context
Data Portal found that 5.35 billion people are using the Internet in 2024. This number is equivalent to 66.2% of the global population. As such worldwide internet adoption is increasingly high, the number of online buyers will increase accordingly. Statista predicted that global retail eCommerce sales will surpass USD 6.3 trillion by 2024. Meanwhile, B2B eCommerce is estimated to report a revenue of over USD 2 trillion at the same time.
Unsurprisingly, the growing popularity of eCommerce led to an increase in its websites. Over 27 million eCommerce sites are recorded in 2024, dominated by the United States and China with key players like Amazon and Alibaba.
As eCommerce websites are so popular with customers, having one for your business can help you increase conversions and profits. However, a poorly-developed website can ruin your audience’s trust for your company. But how can you design the best website while standing out among a myriad of eCommerce websites?
This concern encouraged the rapid growth of website development services. Accordingly, their market will be worth more than USD 130 billion by 2032. These services give your business enough tools and power to create websites that get closer to your current and potential customers.
Recommended reading: 6 Best eCommerce App Development Companies
Options When Building An eCommerce Website
When building the eCommerce storefront for your business, you’re likely to come across a number of different options, which Designveloper will lay out below.
Build From Scratch
If you already have a team of people working on web development or IT, open-source software might be the best choice for you. Open-source eCommerce platforms are ones where you can change any part of the code. This lets you build your website from the ground up, with few or no limits.
Be aware, though, that when your company uses an open-source solution, it usually has to take care of things like PCI compliance, web hosting, security problems, and manual patching and upgrades. Because of this, some companies may think that open source is too hard, expensive, and tech-heavy. This is especially true as your company grows and its operations get more complex.
Employ SaaS
Don’t know how to code or don’t have the money to start from scratch? Employ SaaS eCommerce. SaaS is a subscription-based service that is built and maintained by a third-party vendor. It also may be hosted in the “cloud”. Instead of building and developing a custom solution yourself, SaaS lets you rent the platform.
The platform provider handles tasks like product updates, security, hosting, PCI compliance, and everything else that comes with managing your own software. Because of this, SaaS solutions, especially affordable website builders, help businesses get to market quickly and at a low cost.
MACH
Under the standard eCommerce architecture, which has been used for many years, the front-end storefront and the back-end server-side have been combined into a single monolithic structure. As your company grows and needs more complex solutions, like launching multiple websites or expanding into new regions, a monolithic solution may be a smart choice for small and mid-sized (SMB) businesses with limited needs. But when your company goes through these growing pains, it may also face some problems.
All of these problems can be solved by the MACH architecture. MACH is short for microservices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless. It is a set of best-of-breed principles for building corporate software tech stacks. In contrast to a single-piece design, MACH gives you the freedom to choose the technology that will help your company the most in the future.
5 Steps Of eCommerce Website Development
Now that you know the answer to the question “What is eCommerce website development?”, let’s talk about how you can start building your eCommerce site.
Below is a step-by-step guide to develop a desired eCommerce website:
1. Establish A Brand
In the world of online business, building a brand means making a number of important choices. First, you need to figure out if your online business is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C).
You’ll need to know your clients so you can change your eCommerce project to meet their needs. This includes everything from the kind of picture used to how detailed the product descriptions are. Last but not least, you’ll need to come up with a catchy name for your company. It should be unique and easy to remember, and it should also reflect your brand’s goals.
2. Choose A Platform & Domain
The domain name for your brand should be easy to remember, short, and describe the brand. Most of the time, the best choice is almost always the name of your organization. You can also choose a domain tool from a list, like the Dot-o-motor, which helps you choose a domain name according to the keywords you enter.
You also have the option of building and improving your website with the help of an eCommerce platform. They can help you build your website from the ground up and give you options for personalization. Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are just a few of the platforms you can choose from.
Recommended reading: 10 Best eCommerce Website Design Services for Success
3. Design & Develop Your Site
In this phase, you need to work with the front end and back end of your website. As for front-end, consider colors, themes, and any design elements that align with your business goals and even end-users. However, each designer may have a visual preference, which leading to inconsistency among design elements. To resolve this issue, for example, we at Designveloper leverage Google Material 3 to ensure all design elements are consistent and to create effective UI/UX designs.
In addition to design elements, your website needs to be easy to navigate around and to clarify what it’s about. Further, you can leverage cutting-edge techs like AI to personalize product recommendations for each visitor, to enable advanced search filters, etc. Most importantly, all these features need to well-designed and organized to ensure seamless transactions.
As for the server side, you should build a robust and scalable back-end infrastructure to support your site’s functionality and performance. This includes database management, API development, order & inventory management, etc. Further, you need to integrate strong security measures like data encryption and secure authentication to safeguard user data and transactions.
4. Get Ready For Launch
But before you make your website public, you should test it thoroughly. This will ensure to make sure that all parts, especially those that have to do with making a purchase, are working as they should. Some testing methods we already used include white box testing, black box testing, and API testing. Moreover, we also leverage automated testing tools like Jest, Mocha, or Cypress to write test cases, avoid bugs, and ensure the quality of websites.
Once all have been tested, it’s time to launch your website. Don’t forget to devise a marketing campaign to promote your website and products and bring in more money.
After you make your website available to the public, you must advertise it so that you can get more people to visit it and make more money for your business. At this point, you can choose to use pay-per-click ads, use an SEO strategy, or promote the website on social media.
5. Maintenance
Your eCommerce website development will need regular updates so that it shows any changes in your inventory, product line, or promotions. It’s possible that your website’s design doesn’t have the features that you or your customers need. Some parts of the design also need changes for your customer’s liking. Unlike traditional stores with brick-and-mortar locations, eCommerce websites are easy to change because all you have to do is click a button.
FURTHER READING: |
1. How to Save Big on eCommerce App Development Cost? |
2. How to Build an eCommerce Website Fastest in 2023 |
5 Qualities Of Successful eCommerce Website Development
There are a few important things that an eCommerce website must have in order for it to be successful. These parts include everything from the back-end code to the website’s clickable parts and checkout process.
Responsive Design
Successful eCommerce website development needs to have a great user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). When it comes to eCommerce, the most important things for a good UI/UX design are a clean design, clear copy, a search bar, and filters that make it easy for customers to find the product or range of products they want.
Security
When you start an online business, you will deal with sensitive information like customer phone numbers, credit card numbers, and other payment information. Because of this, it is up to you to handle this information very carefully. To accept payments, you have to meet PCI Compliance criteria. If you don’t, you could get fined, and lose the trust of your customers. You could also have other bad financial effects related to fraud.
However, the bare minimum that some platforms offer might not be enough. Even though some platforms already have an SSL certificate installed, you may need to buy more software from a third party or spend more money on your own infrastructure to make sure it is secure enough.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) can raise the visibility of your products by making your site rank higher in search engines. This can lead to more sales (also referred to as conversion rate). To reach this goal, you can use a variety of content strategies and techniques. They consist of using specific keywords in the copy of your website or the product descriptions. This is so as to get your website to rank higher than that of your competitors in search results.
Recommended reading: How To Outsource SEO & Web Design Processes?
Marketing Strategies
You should start working on your eCommerce website development marketing strategy as soon as possible when you are making an online store. This will help you figure out how your site will be set up and what features you may need.
As part of your marketing plan, for example, you might want to add social sharing options to your website. Or, if mobile commerce is a big part of your overall plan, you might want to think about adding push notifications or making a mobile app.
Smooth Checkout
When the checkout process is hard to deal with, sales often go down. Customers who have to go through long and complicated sign-up processes before they can get the things they want may decide not to buy anything at all. So, consider adding a “guest checkout” option so that customers can complete transactions with as little work as possible (and less data).
In order to speed up the process, even more, you might want to add a one-click checkout option for customers who have already signed up on your site and whose credit card information is already stored (safely!) with you. This way, you wouldn’t have to put things in a shopping cart.
You can also use third-party payment services like Shop Pay or Apple Pay, or you can let customers quickly sign up by linking their Facebook or Google accounts. You decide what to do with both of these options.
Top 10 eCommerce Website Development Tools
The worldwide eCommerce market is thriving. If you run an online store or want to build one, you should be ready for a lot of competition. And this is not the end. Your eCommerce website can’t work on its own. Instead, it needs a wide range of other eCommerce website development tools so it can help you run your business well.
Why? These eCommerce solutions can help you in many ways. They include putting live chatbots on your website and finding the most important customer touchpoints. Further, they make it easy for your online store to run smoothly and help your business grow conveniently.
1. Shopify
Shopify is a complete eCommerce platform that helps online businesses get started. The services include a full set of eCommerce tools, such as a website builder with paid and free themes, built-in marketing tools to help create, run, and analyze digital marketing campaigns, a shopping cart with 100 different payment gateways, and the ability to sell through multiple channels.
It stays on top because it has a low entry point ($29 per month for the “Basic Shopify” plan) and everything you need. This means that you can take care of your domain hosting, SSL certification, ads monitoring, analytics, website design, and sales management all from a single platform.
Recommended reading: Top 12 Software Consulting Companies
You can run an entire eCommerce website on your own, which is a plus. However, if you want more than what your design gives you, you may need to hire a developer. They will help you work around the SEO flaws of the platform you are using, which is a minus.
2. BigCommerce
BigCommerce has an online storefront builder that can be used by businesses with a lot of customers. It lets business owners who are tech-savvy and want to grow their operations host their websites and customize them in a lot of different ways. Since you can’t register your domain name through BigCommerce, you’ll need to get a domain name from a different company and then link it to your business.
BigCommerce’s advanced features include the ability to sell products around the world, search engine optimization (SEO) apps and storefronts, and multichannel sales on social and online selling platforms. It might be harder to use these advanced features, though.
Recommended reading: How To Develop A Mobile-Friendly eCommerce Website?
3. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the best-known open-source eCommerce platforms you can use right now. It comes with a number of themes that have been made especially for WordPress. If you use these themes, you’ll be able to set up a unique online store. You will also have access to a lot of benefits, such as an unlimited number of products, complete freedom when it comes to tailoring your marketing, an easy way to keep track of your orders, and free shipping, to name a few.
Some people think that WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform in the world. Most of this is because it works well with WordPress. It gives store owners and people who make WordPress templates full control over their own work. WooCommerce is currently used by more online stores (30%) than any other platform. You can choose from hundreds of free and paid WordPress add-ons with lots of customizations.
4. Google Analytics
When you keep track of everything, you can get information that could help your business grow in the long run.
Google Analytics should be your go-to tool if you want to track of how much traffic you’re getting. This eCommerce website development tool can also help you find out where your visitors are coming from so you can better target clients. You can set up your account so that it tells you when people leave your site, how long they stay on your site, which pages get the most views, and other useful information.
5. Wix
In response to a growing trend in the industry, Wix, which has an easy-to-use website builder, has recently started offering eCommerce solutions for online stores. With Wix’s easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder, you can make an online store that fits your needs perfectly. Additionally, it also offers a place to register your domain name, and to host your website.
Wix gives you a few helpful tools that can help you run your online store. It lets you make abandoned cart campaigns, track orders, accept online payments, sell on more than one channel, and sell on more than one channel at the same time. But some important inventory management features aren’t part of Wix’s basic plan.
There are low-stock alerts, tax calculators, and dropshipping options among these features. If you have a lot of stock, you’ll want eCommerce website development tools that comes with more advanced tools for keeping track of stock.
The good news is that there are plenty of third party platforms which integrate with Wix to expand its functionality. For instance, you can use tools to set up a subscription payment for Wix sites that lets you generate recurring income from customers if this aligns with your business model. The biggest weakness? You can make an eCommerce site for free, but you won’t be able to sell anything on the site yet.
6. Ahrefs
If you are new to the field of eCommerce web analytics and want your work to be simple and easy, the next thing you should do is learn more about Ahrefs. No matter if you own your own business or work as a freelancer, you can get access to Ahrefs eCommerce Analytics Solution’s services for as little as $99 per month.
All of Ahrefs’ features, like researching keywords, analyzing competitors, researching content and backlinks, tracking rank, and keeping an eye on websites, are all part of its full set of functions. Ahrefs is a tool that is used by marketers at Netflix, LinkedIn, Uber, Adobe, and TripAdvisor, among other well-known companies.
7. Magento
Magento is an eCommerce tool that Adobe gives to its clients. It is an all-in-one solution for online business that handles more than $100 billion in gross merchandise sales every year. No matter how big or small your website is, Magento works. This platform is made to handle B2B (business-to-business) online sales as well as small, mid-market, and enterprise-level businesses.
Magento is different from other platforms because it is very efficient and automated, with access to important data. Some of the services that will help you are inventory management, business analytics, shipping solutions, and order management. This eCommerce platform gives customers a number of ways to organize and customize their shopping experience.
Your store will automatically show products, promotions, information, and prices based on things like the customer’s location, their order history, their gender, their lifetime value as a customer, and items on their wish list. You can even make the buying process better for people who have never been to your website before. This is due to an algorithm based on the products they have looked at or put in their shopping cart.
8. Squarespace
Squarespace offers an amazing way to design a website. In addition, it has some of the best and most up-to-date themes you can find. It’s important to remember that this eCommerce website development tool is mostly for building standard websites, but the platform does have a great Commerce plan with prices starting at $26 per month. After that, all you have to do is connect your payment processor, choose a theme, and start making sales.
Designveloper highly recommends this eCommerce website builder for businesses that want a more modern, media-based design. There are tools for social networking, design, inventory management, and marketing, so a new eCommerce store can get everything it needs. On the other hand, you shouldn’t expect to be able to build a big store with Squarespace.
9. Drip
After you’ve set up your shop and gotten a company number, you might want to think about getting more customers. You will need an email marketing solution in order to do this. Drip is a great way to grow your audience and send people emails they want to get. You can build campaigns and workflows with it, as well as write emails, send offers, and send offers.
You can tag emails in Drip, which lets you keep track of who opens what, where people are coming from, and what topics they are into. That you’ll be able to send the right messages to the right people. You can also program your own procedures to make your email sequences run on their own.
10. Ecwid
Ecwid is a free add-on for your website that focuses on commerce. It works with WordPress and other popular content management systems. You can add the Ecwid tool to Adobe Muse, Weebly, Joomla, Tumblr, and Wix, as well as Blogger and Wix. With it, you will be able to sell on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.
Unlike 3DCart, installing Ecwid on a website doesn’t require you to know anything about web building or coding. The Ecwid software can also be used in “brick-and-mortar” stores, where customers can make purchases in person.
If you already use WordPress but don’t want to use WooCommerce as an eCommerce tool, Ecwid is a good alternative. Ecwid has a free plan that you can use for as long as you want, but it has a lot of limits. You won’t be able to sell more than 10 things in total, and you won’t be able to use any other sales channels besides your website.
Cutting-edge Technologies Used in eCommerce Website Development
Apart from the mentioned tools you should think about adding some new features to the code of your eCommerce website. This will be your edge to beat out your competitors and get more customers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is changing the way people buy and sell things. In particular, it powers chatbots to communicate with customers while human agents are unavailable. AI can also analyze browsing interests and activities to your site to suggest relevant offerings. Or it can recognize images and help customers find what they want. With all of its continually improving features, it helps your business reach your eCommerce goals easily.
Blockchain
As you look for eCommerce website development tutorials, you may see ads or offers to build a website using blockchain technology. This is not without reasons.
Blockchain is one of the most optimal ways at the moment to organize data that ensures security, transparency, and decentralization. It has many uses in online retailing. Some of these uses are payments and exchanges, stopping fraud, sending packages in a secure way, and others.
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is welcome in almost every industry today, and eCommerce website development is no exception. Some of the most common ways that virtual reality and augmented reality are used on eCommerce sites are for home improvement, virtual fitting, and VR merchandising.
However, it’s not a cheap solution. So if you want to build an eCommerce website from scratch with VR features, you’ll need to build your budget around the costs of VR. If you need help, you can ask companies like Designveloper for advice.
Conclusion
Even though eCommerce is getting more and more competitive every day, there is still room to move up if you are willing to put in the work. The Designveloper team hopes that this article will point you in the right direction for eCommerce website development.
The goal of any store should be to make it easy and straightforward to buy something. Always test your systems by going through the process of buying something as if you were a customer. You should look for ways to improve the overall user experience and ways to get rid of bottlenecks.
Working with a company like Designveloper that helps with eCommerce website development can also make it easier to grow your business. Get in touch with us as soon as possible to find out how we can help your brand grow.
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