Animated Marketing

Starting a New eCommerce Site

January 21, 2010

The title is worthy to be accompanied by a lengthy How-to book. But I want to paraphrase some basic, but very important points to consider when looking to start a new eCommerce site.

Domain Name

So you’ve decided to sell products online. Great! But where do you begin? Just go out and see if a good domain name is available for your site. Let’s say you want to sell Toys. Stop right there and go back and find a product to sell that you can’t buy at every store in town. Vintage Toys? Ok, that’s better.

I register all my domains at Godaddy. Why? Because they are the #1 domain name registrar in the world. The reason. They have superior customer service. And their prices are great too.

So go over to Godaddy.com and start searching, via their Domain search bar, for a good domain. Forget about Vintagetoys.com. That’s been registered forever. Keep trying until you come up with something that you like.

Things to keep in mind when searching for a domain name:

1. Keep it as short as possible

2. .com is always better

3. No hyphens if at all possible

4. Keywords in the domain don’t hurt

5. Something catchy that people might remember

Once you’ve thought of a domain name, and you like it, register it NOW! Why? Because it only costs a few bucks to register a domain. And you can sit on it until you are ready to start building your website.

Just register an account with Godaddy. Then, when you get to the pages where they try to sell you some other goodies, you can bypass these steps by scrolling to the bottom and click ‘No Thanks’. After you complete your domain purchase, you can then log in to your Domain Manager section of your account and manage the nameservers, locking, and other domain features.

Web Host

After you get a domain, you need to find you a good web host. A web host is where your website files will reside so that your website will show up when someone types in your url. I recommend Hostgator, hands down. Like Godaddy is the top domain registrar, Hostgator is the top Webhosting company. They have impeccable service. You can get in touch with a Livechat agent 24/7 or just call their toll free number. I usually get a tech on the phone in 30 secs to a minute. They are awesome!

Register for a hosting account with them and you’ll get details about your login information by e-mail shortly thereafter. If you have any questions on which packages are best for you, just contact them. They will be happy to help.

Shopping Cart

Next you need a Shopping cart solution. There are several options out there. There are many services online where you pay a monthly fee for the shopping cart + hosting combo. Volusion is one such company. I have never used them. This could get expensive if you have a limited budget.

There are some CGI shopping carts that will add-on to existing HTML sites. These require that you place some code next to all the products on your site. The code usually makes some type of ‘Buy’ button on the customer end, that will take them to the CGI cart. I have used this solution before, and had some problems with the cart communicating with Authorize.net (payment gateway). This resulted in some orders not showing up in the cart. Still could be a viable option.

You can also find a standalone cart option such as X-cart. Though you will pay for a license upfront, there are no monthly fees associated with a standalone cart, and you have full access to the source files to make any changes you want. These standalone carts are usually search engine friendly and have several different themes to choose from. Basically you can just change the default logo and start uploading products via a robust backend. The backend has a lot of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) function, so you don’t have to know HTML to create pages and upload products.

There are also some free shopping cart software solutions like Zen Cart, OScommerce and Magento. A disadvantage to these solutions is that they are very plain, out of the box. But if you go to Templatemonster.com, you can search ‘eCommerce templates’ and find some nifty themes that would make your store look like a customized, clean design.

Accepting Payments

There are some different options for accepting payments online. Paypal is easy to set up and accepted on most sites. But by itself, it’s not the best option. Google checkout is pretty good. Just keep in mind they have some pretty hefty policies over there. There are also some Third party merchant account solutions that charge a fee per transaction. 2checkout.com is one you might have seen a bit. But I’ve always gone with the #1 payment gateway, Authorize.net. Authorize.net is the actual payment gateway, not the merchant account. You will still need to find a good company with the most competitive rates to set up your merchant account. I use United Bank Card. They have the most competitive rates, and have always been very helpful on my websites.

SSL

This stands for Secure Sockets Layer. You will need to buy an SSL so that your checkout area is secure on your eCommerce website. Talk to your webhost about setting this up. Hostgator sells their private ssl for $50/yr.

Don’t Re-invent the Wheel

Once you are ready to go, and you start uploading products, and designing your website, just remember not to re-invent the wheel. Any great startup company has always researched the competition. I would suggest that you look up your keywords in Google and find out who the top 20 players are. You can skip Wikipedia and any non-related sites that might be in there. Only look at the sites that are to be your direct competition.

See what keywords they are targeting in their meta Title, as well as their meta Description. Make sure that you are targeting the right keywords before building your categories, page names, and link campaign.

Most importantly, if you get stuck on anything at all, just ask Google. Back in 2003, I learned a ton about HTML, building websites, search engine optimization, merchant accounts, freelancers, 301 redirects, etc. from searching in Google. Google is much better than the library I had growing up. You don’t even have to go to the card catalog to find what you are looking for.

Other Questions

If you are just starting out, and you have questions, feel free to comment at the end of this post. I’ll be glad to help where I can. For advanced users, I will get more specific in an upcoming post.