Pointers to consider before starting an ecommerce business.

Most of us want to start an e-commerce website to sell something. If you are thinking to launch one website, you should consider the following pointers.

Objective:

  • Brand new business and website are the first-ever channels you are going to sell.
  • There is a physical shop and you want to digitize the shop
  • You already have a website but needs to upgrade/revamp to increase engagement

Products:

What are the products and how many types of articles are you intending to sell? This helps in deciding what type of shop you like to use on your website. If it only one or very few products it will be very easy to set up and if you have a wide range and its variants, then you should build a bit more sophisticated bespoke application.

Target Audience: 

If you are selling your products nationwide then the shop is fairly simple. If you are looking for international sales, you should consider adding a multi-location shop, multi-language, multi-currency, and variable shipment costs.

Third-party fulfillment or integration

If you are considering manufacturing and fulfillment by a third party, then you should consider integrating to their ordering system to automate and ease order fulfillment. Such functionalities will be mostly available in custom or enterprise solutions. 

 Quality Images

You should source quality photos for your products. If you are selling branded products, then you might already receive them from manufacturers. The other 2 options that you have are photography and CGI rendering.

Photography is feasible when you have all the products physically and variants with you and the number are less. The drawback is the lighting should be great to get quality images and sometimes it takes a lot of time and effort.

The alternative for an expensive and effortful photoshoot is CGI rendering. This should be done by quality professionals to make the product images photorealistic. You need accurate drawings of the products to create CGI.

Technology / Platform

There is a wide range of options to build an e-commerce website such as, woo commerce, Shopify, Magento, Wix, square space, and bespoke programming platforms such as Python-based Django, Java-based Spring, etc.

Subscription-based solutions like Shopify, Wix, and square space can be used if you have limited products and no complex third-party solution integration. These services are good to start with limited products and there will be a monthly subscription plus transaction commissions. 

If you are running a huge operation with large products, multi-vendors, logistics, fulfillment, and manufacturing, then enterprise solutions are economical compared to the subscription-based solution mentioned earlier. There will be a lot of flexibility on such bespoke and enterprise solutions.

User Experience & Responsiveness 

The e-commerce website must be mobile responsive, and easy to navigate and check out. Over 60% of the users use mobile devices to purchase items online. Focus more on mobile version design of the e-commerce website during development. 

Did you know?

With the rise in technologies such as augmented reality/ virtual reality, there are 3D viewer solutions for a product-based e-commerce website. The user can virtually try on clothes or furniture for their property and also have a 3-dimensional view of products. Such type of solutions increases customer engagement and can increase sales up to 200%! To know more about furious fox 3D e-commerce solutions, click here.