Ecommerce website design is the process of creating an online store for your business to sell digitally to target consumers.
To design an e-commerce website, you need to plan, conceptualize, and arrange your content and products for effective display on the Internet.
Complete transactions online without ever having to handle any cash. We assist in planning your online store and adding in payment gateways.
For an ecommerce store you will need to have the following:
– Content
– Payment Gateway in order to accept payments
– Courier Service so that your products can be delivered to your clients or buyers
– SSL Certificate
– Plugins to enhance the store
– Return and exchange policy
Content For the web site
You will need to get your information together in an electronic format
Planning needs to be done for the site structure
- How many categories
- Each category will need a:
- Category name
- Category description
- Category introductory paragraph
- Category photo / image
- Each category will need a:
- How many products
- Products
- Product name
- Product description
- Short description
- Long description
- Product image / picture
- Product code
- Stock quantity
- Product weight
- Nice to haves if available
- Video
Payment Gateway
A payment gateway is needed in order to take online payments on your web site, such as bank eft electronic transfers to credit card transactions.
Usually if you are doing local transactions within the borders of your country there is no need to have a merchant account, but once you start with international transactions you may need to get a merchant account.
Local payment gateway options:
Please note Yoco and Payfast only accepts payments in South African Rands (ZAR). This means that goods or services need to be listed in ZAR on your website. Customers can pay with an international card, but because Yoco/Payfast accepts ZAR only, the customer’s bank will do an automatic currency conversion from the customer’s home currency into ZAR.
International payment gateway options:
Courier Service
A courier service or shipping company is needed in order to deliver your products to your clients when you fill the order.
Some local courier options in South Africa
Some International courier options
The courier company can provide shipping tables that can then be imported to the platform, this will enable us to calculate the shipping for the order on your web site.
You can also decide how you will structure your shipping costs.
Other options for shipping can also be
- Standard shipping rate
- Free shipping
- Free shipping for a spend over a certain amount
SSL Certificate
Most hosting solutions today has by default an SSL certificate, usually it is a Lets encrypt security certificate
If you have needs for a more advaced security certificate you can secure your store with SSL Certificates from SSL Store Provider of brands likeSymantec DigiCert Thawte GeoTrust RapidSSL & Comodo.
Policies
You will need to have pages that cover the following policies.
These policies are required by laws of various countries.
If you are going to make use of online advertising like Google Ads, FaceBook Ads and LinkedIn ads will require to have the policies in place before your ad will run.
– Shipping and delivery
– Returns and cancelations
– Privacy
– Policy Generator is a nice resource to generate policy pages
– You can also review what other online stores have done
Plugins to enhance the store
– Woo Commerce Themes
– Currency Converter
– Abandoned Cart recovery
– Invoice
– Membership Site
– Cart Flows
Other options can be:
- Shoppify
- ecwind
- They work on a sliding scale of a monthly fee based on how many products you have that can work out quite expensive
