Do you want your business to expand to the largest market in the world but have no computer skills? You don’t have to limit yourself because you didn’t study computers and programming in college. You still can open a virtual business or extend your regular business to the Internet by hiring an e-commerce services company.
However, if the quotations you get are full of words that you don’t understand, don’t worry. Here are the most common terms used in ecommerce development services that you’ll find across.
Domain. Domain is the name of your company online. It usually ends with a period followed by three letters. For example, google.com or yahoo.com.
Hosting. Also known simply as host. It’s the service of renting a space on someone’s computers that are connected to the Internet all the time. You have to rent this to put the files that create your virtual store and make it available to the public.
Shopping cart. A program that allows you to handle your virtual store. It does many things, but mainly you need it to organize your products, present them to the clients, and let them buy them.
Payment gateway. A program that allows you to receive payments through one or more ways. You should have at least capability to receive payments through Visa, Master Card and PayPal. Other ways depend on your market or area. For example, if you have an important quantity of sales in the USA, you should probably get American Express as well.
PPC/PPA. Two very common ways of paid advertisement on the Internet. PPC stands for “pay per click,” a marketing scheme that pays according to the number of clicks on a button. PPA stands for “pay per action” and it is similar except that payment is done when a certain action is done; for example, when a visitor types his or her e-mail.
SEO. One of the most popular e-commerce services there are. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. It aims at making a website naturally rank higher in search engines such as Google and Yahoo by using a series of online techniques and processes.
Understanding the several types of e-commerce services is important if you want to hire a company to put your business online. You don’t have to know how e-commerce services are done exactly, but if you know what they are about, you will be able to negotiate a much better price and avoid looking like a beginner.
E-Commerce Services: Basic Vocabulary
X-Cart Developers: Why Go Through the Extra Cost?
Opening an online business is a good idea. You get more customers, more publicity, access to international markets, and payments in advance.
You also hear that opening an online business is easy. However, most people that want to open an online business are looking to open an online version of their brick and mortar business. And while it’s true that the process of opening an online business is rather easy, it requires knowledge and skills on programming and coding. And if you have a brick and mortar business, chances are that your education and skills are about whatever your business is about, not about coding and programming.
For example, X-cart is often praised as a very efficient and feature rich shopping cart software program. And it’s true; it allows you to do many things that other shopping programs don’t (specially open source shopping cart programs). However, do you know things like payment gateways, hosting, MySQL database, PHP, protocols, etc? Yes, you can educate yourself on the subject and practice until you handle them, but with a business to run, most people don’t have the time and energy it requires.
That’s why sometimes it pays to hire X-cart developers for you. Yes, the cost will increase as paying for the X-cart software already costs $115 (at the time of writing this article), but in return you will save something more valuable, your time.
Consider this analogy, when your car breaks down, you don’t usually have the skills and knowledge to fix it. You could learn them and fix your car yourself, but it’s much faster and convenient to pay a mechanic to do it. X-cart developers are no different; you pay to get a job done so you can dedicate your time to other things.
X-cart developers have yet another advantage. Unlike fixing a car, creating a website requires some originality and creativity. In addition, X-cart developers can advise you on what features are the most successful or advisable for your website. This will result not only in a page that works, but a page that has a higher conversion of visitor to purchaser.
Finally, while hiring X-cart developers has a cost, the end result will bring you more sales over time. Plus, if you hire developers on other countries, like India, you get the same level of quality at a much cheaper price.
Ecommerce Web Development Company – Your Guide to Starting One
Starting an ecommerce web development company is not an easy joke. The competition in the industry is quite intense and you need to go that extra mile to be able to satisfy your customers and stand out from the rest of the crowd. You need to set high standards with your services and yet at the same time offer them at an affordable rate.
If you are thinking of starting an ecommerce website development company, you need to first get your basics right. You should come up with a list of services that you are going to offer. Once you have the list ready, you need to start the hiring process. Once you have a group of professionals with you, you can start promoting your company and build a clientele.
A high quality website is indispensable for any company these days, even more so for an ecommerce web development company. The website should tell everything about your company – your management setup, the services you offer, your expertise in various areas, value added services that you provide, and some testimonials from the clients you have worked with in the past. This kind of a website can give people a good idea of what you are capable of and what makes your company special when compared to your competitors.
Having a group of highly skilled professionals is an absolute must for any ecommerce web development company. Your team should have a good mix of experienced professionals as well as very talented newcomers. You should have a dedicated team for different areas like web design, SEO, shopping cart development, ecommerce integration, and content development. You should keep your team of professionals highly motivated so that they finish all the projects on time without compromising on quality.
Promotion and marketing plays a very big role in the growth of an ecommerce web development company. Though you could get clients through word of mouth, it is not enough to sustain high growth in the long run. So, you should promote yourself aggressively both online and offline. It is very important to optimize your website for search engines so that it shows up in the first page of search engine results when someone searches for ecommerce web design and development companies.
Once you promote yourself properly, you will start getting a lot of clients. A lot depends on how you serve your first set of clients. If you offer great service at affordable rates, you can get some very positive testimonials from your clients and use it to promote your company further. If you keep doing this, you can establish yourself as a successful ecommerce web development company.
Tips For Selecting An E-Commerce Web Development Company
Looking for an ECommerce Website Development company? Here are a few tips that might help you.
• First of all, don’t take cost as your only way of comparing two companies. Cost is very relative when it comes to determining if a company is good or not. A good company from a poor country might charge as much as a bad company from a rich country, for example. Of course, the situation might be the other way around, which is yet another reason not to judge an e-commerce web development company by price alone.
• Be specific about what you want. If you’re having a meeting or a phone call with a supplier, make sure that you do your homework and bring as many specific features as possible. That way you can ask more pertinent questions and make specific demands. Ask how the different products you make can be classified and offered to the public. How the payments are processed. If there are specific taxes in your country or area, can they be integrated in the paying process? Are your usual methods of receiving payment going to be integrated as they are or do they require modification?
• Be open to their suggestions. An e-commerce web development company has done several jobs similar to yours. They might offer you something that you hadn’t though about it before. Or maybe some features that you asked for can give you a better result if implemented in a slightly different way. This is specially useful when reducing the number of clicks that customers need to make for a purchase. If your original idea is too complex, simplifying it can help you avoid losing customers.
When in doubt about one of their suggestions, neither accept it nor reject it. Ask
for more type to study it.
• Don’t limit your choices to companies in your area or country. This is the World Wide Web we’re talking about. If you can’t find a good e-commerce web development area locally, look for it on the other side of the world.
• Lastly, if you have narrowed down your suppliers to a few choices, go to the website of each e-commerce web development company. After all, if that’s what their business is, it’s just logical that every e-commerce web development company puts its best efforts towards their own page. If the page you look at is not nearly close to something you’d like for your own page, then move on to the next company.
Comparing Companies That Offer Online E-Commerce Solutions
Due to the increase of trading over the Internet, most companies and some individuals are hiring companies or developers that specialize in online e-commerce solutions for their websites. They know that the potential increase of their sales online depends greatly of the quality and design of their webpage, and thus, they are prepared to spend the funds needed in an attempt to increase their profits.
Ecommerce Development Company
However, it can be difficult to select a good and cheap supplier. They all promise you great results, but whether they deliver them or not is another matter. There is also the problem of what is considered a “great result;” which is not very concrete, even when it’s measurable.
For example, what is better? a company that offers “more sales”? or a company that offers “customer awareness”? Both of these terms are rather ambiguous and difficult, if not impossible to measure. Note that no company will guarantee you a minimum amount of sales, for instance “sales of $10,000 in one month.” But then again not even regular publicity and promotion techniques will offer those kinds of guarantees.
One solution is to study the exact online e-commerce solutions that are offered, as these are much more measurable. They also resemble traditional advertisement. For example, 1,000 banner ads on 200 different websites. Another common technique is the creation of a blog with articles relevant to the products of the company. These articles are usually filled with keywords related to the company’s business. A third example is posting on forums. Let’s say 1,500 posts on 300 forums.
While these online e-commerce solutions are measurable, they still don’t guarantee sales. You can have a thousand people see your ad, but they won’t buy your product unless they find a cost benefit ratio that’s better than the alternatives. However, when well done, they can be very effective.
One of the latest and most popular online e-commerce solutions is purchased traffic. Let’s say, 5,000 visitors per day. In this way, you skip the advertising process and get the traffic that would have been generated by the advertising. This solution is popular because it’s very easy and cost effective.
Of course, none of these will guarantee sales, just more traffic and more people that see your company and your products. This can increase the level of sales, but still, how do you compare all these companies?
In my opinion, a simple subjective test is the best way to go. Just go to the webpages of these companies that offer online e-commerce solutions. Does the page of a specific company make you want to find out more about its products and services? If it does, then you have a strong candidate. If it doesn’t, just keep looking.
What An E-commerce Developer Does
An e-commerce developer is not a computer programmer or a “computer guy.” It’s an individual that specializes on solutions for companies regarding the sale of products over the Internet.
This might seems an easy task for most people, since the final result usually is very easy to use. Anyone that has bought a plane ticket online knows what a great advantage it is over having to go to the airport or travel agency, or over being put on hold for hours when calling a company.
Nevertheless, the work that is needed is complex and often monotonous. Imagine a company that literally handles thousands of different products, like BestBuy or Costo. Each and every single one of those products needs to be entered in the system, and with such a long and tedious list, extra care is needed in order to avoid mistakes.
Let’s not forget that all those items have to be categorized in a simple way so that clients can find them easily. Most companies have a classification system that the developer can use, but sometimes he must come up with his own classification.
An e-commerce developer must also select and install an e-commerce payment method. Such method will not only depend on functionality, but also on cost. Certain payment gateways will charge bigger fees than others, but they are more trusted and well-known by clients than cheaper, less popular payment gateways. Thus, costs should not only be measured on immediate payments, but also on projected fees and payments in the future, according to the company’s online sales projections.
As if this were not enough an e-commerce developer has to connect the company’s site with every pertinent system in the company. Finance and accounting will need reports on the sales generated through Internet, sometimes on real time. Production and shipment should have reports on the items requested and the addresses to which to ship, in order to plan the cheapest and more efficient shipment loads possible. The marketing department will also be involved for surveys, change of prices, and advertisement through the company’s website.
As you can see, being an e-commerce developer isn’t as easy. However, for those who like to work with computers, it’s a good profession. And with the market requiring these skills more and more, salaries in this field are very good.
The importance of E-commerce Store Development
It is no wonder that more and more companies are looking for third parties to handle the e-commerce store development they need. Just like traditional marketing, today it is not enough to have an online store. It is imperative that the online store catches the attention and focuses on the market niche that the company aims to.
There are many advantages of hiring professionals to handle your e-commerce store development. The most important one is that it saves you from training your staff in a very specialized shopping cart program. Such training takes time and money, and if all you’re going to be needed is one webpage for your company, then you’re just over investing.
Companies that do e-commerce store development already have the experience and the knowledge needed. In addition, since they have done many similar projects, they can handle quick turn arounds. They basically create a “skeleton” workframe which they complete with specific features according to your needs.
Another advantage of e-commerce store development companies is that they have a much better idea of what is possible and what is not. Also, they can give you suggestions on how to improve your design. This often results in the addition of a feature or two that you hadn’t thought at first but you found out useful for your page.
You might be wondering if e-commerce store development is expensive. Well, it really isn’t, but you don’t want to get the cheapest option available either. Always take some time to consider the options you have and the quality they offer. A good test when comparing suppliers is to check their webpages. The quality they put into their own webpages is a good indicator of what they can deliver. If their page isn’t fully functional or you just don’t like what you see, then it’s better to select a different company. Remember, you want something that attracts clients, not scare them away.