Your questions about e-commerce websites, answered.
What is an e-commerce website?
An e-commerce website facilitates the buying and selling of products and services online.
Users can browse from an online catalogue, add products to a virtual shopping cart, fill in their name and delivery details in a form, check out and pay through a payment gateway, all on one website. Once the process is complete, the website gives the buyer the estimated delivery time and tracking number.
What is a business-to-customer e-commerce website?
A business to customer website sells products or services directly to consumers.
What are the advantages of e-commerce websites?
Automated Processes
Many tasks can be automated using your website features, saving you time and effort in running your business.
Allows 24/7 Operations
Potential customers can visit and buy from your online store anytime.
Lower Operational Costs
Automated processing of transactions reduces the manpower required to run the business.
Also, sellers have the option of not maintaining a brick and mortar store, depending on their situation. Having fewer or no physical stores at all means that money that would have been spent on rent, utilities, and manpower to run the store can be spent elsewhere.
Reach More Potential Customers
Unlike a physical store that relies on foot traffic, your online store can cater to a wider audience beyond your physical location. As long as you can fulfil your customers’ orders and your partner shipping company has coverage in their place, you can practically sell your products anywhere.
Run your Business from Anywhere
As long you have a laptop and internet connection, you can oversee your business from wherever you are.
Measure your Results
ECommerce platforms provide tools that you can use to track how your products are performing. With this available data, you can optimise your products, prices, and offerings to cater to your customers.
What is an e-commerce platform?
An e-commerce platform is a software solution that allows business owners to set up an online store.
E-commerce platforms come with built-in tools and allow integration with third-party software to enable the owner to manage many aspects of the business, such as inventory, order processing, payment processing, accounting, customer service and more.
Some of the common features of an e-commerce platform are as follows.
Store Management Systems
Store management systems typically include the following.
- Product Management System – Lets the admin upload and edit product listings
- Order Management System – Takes care of processing orders, including tracking, email notifications and others
- Return Management System- Takes care of approving requests, sending status updates and so on.
Design Options
Most e-commerce platforms have ready-to-use themes and templates to help you create your online store’s appearance easily. You can also customise your themes to fit the image that you are going for.
Payment Processing
E-commerce platforms let you integrate with payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, WorldPay and others. Some platforms also have their own built-in payment system.
Security
Ecommerce platforms have security features such as SSL encryption and fraud protection tools to keep all transactions protected. They must also meet PCI Security Standards, a set of requirements for websites that work with payment information.
Merchant Tools
Most eCommerce platforms provide tools to help promote the store and to find and retain customers such as the following.
- Automate sending abandoned-cart reminders to your customers that did not continue with the checkout process
- Add social share buttons to your online store
- Create loyalty programs, special discounts, and deals on your online store through the platform’s built-in tools or by allowing integration of third-party apps for such purposes
Analytics and Reports
Many eCommerce platforms allow you to collect and store data and support integration with analytics services.
Knowing who your top customers are, where they are from, your most popular products and other insights can help you make educated decisions about your business.
Integrated Blog Platform
Many eCommerce platforms have integrated blog platforms. Blog posts can attract powerful backlinks, rank for long-tail search queries and boost your SEO.
Top E-commerce Platforms
Shopify
Shopify is a cloud-based, hosted e-commerce platform that is very easy to use. With Shopify, you can set up your online store within a few hours, even if you don’t know how to code.
Here are some of Shopify’s core features.
Storefront
You can instantly create web pages and customise the look and feel of your online store by changing the website template or themes. You can use the free templates out of the box or choose from free or paid themes from a theme store.
If you also sell in person, you can use the Shopify POS (point of sale) app. The app syncs with Shopify so you can track your sales and inventories for both online and physical stores in just one place.
Payment
Shopify has its own payment processor called Shopify Payments, which can save you transaction fees. However, Shopify Payments is not yet available in all countries.
You still have the option to add third-party payment processors, but you will be charged transaction fees when using them.
Sales channels
Aside from your online store, Shopify also lets you add other sales channels to sell anywhere your customers could be. Sales channels include online marketplaces like Amazon and social media platforms like Facebook, and other websites or blogs.
Abandoned cart saver
One of the good features of Shopify is that it offers an abandoned cart saver out of the box in its basic plan. Other e-commerce platforms offer this when you get the higher tier. This feature enables sending of email reminders to people who added something to their shopping cart but did not push through with the transaction.
Product management
As with any e-commerce platform, you can add and edit products and create product categories on your online store. One great feature of Shopify is that it lets you create smart collections. Instead of manually adding products to your collections, you can populate them automatically based on the conditions you set.
Apps
If you need more features and functionalities that are not out of the box, you can use free or paid third-party applications from the Shopify app store.
Advanced customisation
For more advanced customisations for your online store, you have the option to hire a third-party website development company that has expertise in Shopify.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is another popular eCommerce platform that has an easy-to-use interface and has a lot of built-in features. Like Shopify, you don’t need to know how to code to be able to use the platform.
Here are some of BigCommerce features.
Storefront
BigCommerce has several themes you can choose from to create your online store. You can edit these themes with its page builder which lets you drag and drop elements like hero banners, images, video, carousels, spacers, dividers, buttons and others.
Payment processor
BigCommerce has over 65 payment gateway integrations available. It also offers integrations with popular digital and mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Venmo and more. However, the availability of the payment gateways will depend on your country and currency.
Product management
You have more flexibility in adding product options and variants in BigCommerce. A single product can have up to 600 variants. You can also create up to 250 product options for each item.
Sales channels
BigCommerce allows you to add sales channels to your store to sell your products to online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, as well as social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can also create buy buttons that you can put in any blogs, social media posts, landing pages, or anywhere you can add HTML.
Apps
Like other e-commerce platforms, BigCommerce lets you add third-party apps to add more functionality to your store.
Advanced customisation
If you want to add more advanced features and customisation for your online store, you can hire third-party e-commerce website developers with expertise in BigCommerce development.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a customisable, open-source e-commerce platform built on WordPress.
Unlike Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, WooCommerce is not a stand-alone solution. It is a WordPress plugin that lets you add e-commerce functionalities like product display pages, a shopping cart functionality, a checkout, and payment gateways to your website.
It is a little bit more complicated to use than Shopify and other platforms out there. But if you are already familiar with WordPress, you will not find it hard to use.
The plugin itself is free. But you must get and pay for your domain name and web hosting package.
To start your online store, you need to install WordPress on your domain first. Most hosting providers offer a “one-click” WordPress install with your account. However, you have the option to download the WordPress core and manually install it on your domain.
Afterwards, you’ll need a theme for your storefront. You can choose from free and paid WordPress themes. Or if you need a bespoke theme, you can develop your own if you have the skills, or hire a developer to do one for you.
Then you can install and activate the WooCommerce plugin to get basic e-commerce functionalities. You can install WooCommerce extensions to add more functionality to your website.
What is great about WooCommerce is that it is fully customisable. This means that not only can you add extensions to your store, but you can also change the code and content to fully customise your website.
However, doing this requires some level of coding skills and knowledge. Businesses that want bespoke solutions for their WordPress-based online store websites often hire professionals to develop e-commerce websites.
E-commerce Developers in Brisbane
If you are thinking about setting up an e-commerce website, why not contact the Mettro team to discuss what you are hoping to achieve? We have a dedicated website design team that can help you create a fantastic online store.
Mettro are a proudly Queensland, independently owned and operated digital agency that has been delivering award-winning website design & development and digital marketing for over 24 years. We are dedicated to solving our clients’ business problems with smart, simple digital solutions and have the testimonials to prove it.
We’ve built thousands of digital solutions, including WooCommerce and Shopify stores, custom software, e-learning applications and more.
Contact us or book a consultation to discuss your website design project!