How To Choose A Web Design Company For E-commerce Website

When you're searching for the right web design firm for your E-commerce operation, it's important that you leave the task to a service you can trust. You need to trust the right web design firm that can give your e-commerce the kind of quality and attention it needs.

For an e-commerce web site, the website itself is the essential marketing tool that must be in top shape. When you are replacing the traditional brick-and-mortar retail shop with a Web 2.0 e-commerce site, you'll need your website to work well. You don't want your website to have a bad web design that detracts potential visitors from staying for very long. This will result in fewer sales, and this one tiny thing will severely hinder your success.

Before shopping for web design firms to work with you'll need to ask yourself a few important questions first. What kind of budget are you working with, and how quickly do you need your web site created? Do you like the convenience of hiring a local web design firm or does it not matter? Do you already have a rough idea of what your web site should look like, or do you need your selected web design firm to come up with concepts for you? All these questions will help set you on course to the right web design company for your e-commerce operation.

When hiring a web design firm, really the only thing you need to know is the domain name and what you want it to do. All other elements like development, colors, and graphics a good web design company will be able to easily handle for you.

It might be a smart idea for you and your selected web design company to go over competitor websites in the same industry as yours. Analyze these websites for strengths and weakness. What makes them effective and what could be improved on? With this knowledge in hand you'll be able to build a better website.

An important aspect of operating a growing e-commerce operation is internet marketing. You web design company may or may not be able to help you with internet marketing, so be sure to inquire beforehand. Boston Internet Marketing has grown in a big way, so finding an internet marketing service to help you shouldn't be much of a problem at all. Web design is one of most important aspects of online marketing. Boston Internet marketing often covers Boston Web design too. With e-commerce operation, local small businesses are able to compete with large corporations.

Example: Website Design Company India

Choose The Right E-commerce Solution For Your Website

More and more businesses these days are beginning to sell and distribute their products and services via the Internet. It’s a win-win situation – consumers get the best selection at the lowest prices, and retailers get access to markets outside their geographic location. But depending on the type of e-commerce website the business is pursuing, the cost to implement the project could range from a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars. There are some less professional but more cost efficient solutions, as well as some high-end solutions that will have your website rivaling the best e-commerce sites around. In this article I’ll discuss the different options available to website owners as well as the costs associated with those options.

E-commerce on the Cheap

It’s a common misconception that in order to conduct business over the Internet you have to have an expensive merchant account that will allow your customers to pay you by credit card. This used to be the case, but today there are a number of services available that make e-commerce a very affordable option. These services come in the form of third party credit card processors.

A third party credit card processor acts as an intermediary between the customer and your website. Generally, a customer will click on a link to purchase a product and be taken to the third party’s website to process the credit card information in a secure environment. The payment for the purchase is deposited in your account, and the order information is forwarded to you. The only cost to the e-commerce retailer is usually a small fixed fee and / or a small percentage of the sale.

This is a good beginner option for any business looking to make the e-commerce leap because the upfront costs are very low. 2CheckOut (www.2checkout.com) is a good choice for a third party credit card processor - they only require a $49 setup fee, and then $0.45 per transaction and 5.5% of the sale amount. An even cheaper route would be to use PayPal (www.PayPal.com) to receive payment over the Internet. The only downside with PayPal is that the consumer must have a PayPal account in order to use this payment method. The upside of both these products is the fact that they will provide the shopping cart system and associated codes to that are necessary to integrate into your website.

Although using a third party credit card processor can be cheap, it does have its disadvantages. The shopping cart system may not seamlessly integrate with your website because it’s not easily customizable. Also, it looks a little less professional when the purchaser must leave your website in order to enter their credit card information. But, when weighing these disadvantages with the costs associated with building a professional e-commerce website they really don’t seem like a big deal.

Really Taking the Plunge

Opening a fully functional online store with the ability to process credit cards on-site can be a pretty costly production. Here is a list of elements that all need to be integrated: a shopping cart system, secure web server, payment gateway, and a merchant account.

There are some shopping cart systems that are available for free, and many web hosts offer the ability to integrate a shopping cart system into your website. But, if you’d like your system to be fully featured, easy to use, seamlessly integrate with your website, and include advanced functions such as automatically calculating tax and shipping charges, the cost could run several hundred dollars.

The most expensive and difficult part of the process is obtaining a merchant account to process credit card numbers. These accounts usually have monthly and transaction fees associated with them. Fortunately, most businesses already have merchant accounts, and these can be used to process credit cards over the Internet as well. But, in order for the shopping cart system to communicate with a merchant account, they need to be interfaced with a payment gateway. Payment gateways usually require a setup fee of a few hundred dollars and a percentage of each transaction. Lastly, all the communication needs to take place over a secure server. This means that your website hosting package will need to be upgraded to include Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. An SSL certificate is billed on either a yearly or monthly basis, and the cost can total in the hundreds of dollars.

In addition to the extra costs associated with processing transactions right on your website, there is also a significant difference in the price your webmaster will charge to setup the different solutions. Using a third party to process transactions usually just involves inserting a few lines of code into the website which shouldn’t cost very much. On the other hand, implementing a fully functional e-commerce website can easily add another thousand or two dollars on top of all the other costs.

As with any project, it’s probably best to start small before shelling out big bucks for a professional e-commerce solution. And don’t forget, even after you’ve spent thousands of dollars getting your e-commerce website launched, you’re probably going to have to spend thousands more marketing your website in order to recover your investment. E-commerce is not cheap!

Web site design for an Online Property Rental Business

The property market in the UK is a huge industry and online property web sites are becoming increasingly popular. Estate agents are capitalising on the online market to advertise their properties on either their own web sites or on other property portals. There are also a number of portals that enable individuals to upload their own properties for sale or for rent online. Either way, there is a demand for web site design for the online property business. What is a standard property web site design package and what are the interesting web site design add-ons that work?

Let us consider the estate agent that requires a web site to upload their own property portfolio, for sale or for rent. The web site design here consists of the front end or the online client interface and the backend or the admin section that enables the estate agent to easily upload their properties online. Let us configure the front end from a web site design point of view. In terms of design, some graphical elements depicting some nice properties is a winner. The web site must instantly be recognised as a property web site. It is best to determine from the outset which end of the property market the web site is targeting. Whether it’s the low end or the most expensive end, the web site design must reflect the market needs. Do not try to kill several birds with one stone. Identify your market segment and target it with a focussed message.

From a web site design feature set point of view, a property search is essential. Most online visitors will expect to be able to search for a property online using a number of search criteria like number of bedrooms, type of property, area. The graphical side of the web site design must present the search box and fields very prominently as these are a key feature. The online visitor chooses his or her search criteria, drop downs are handy, and results pages matching the search criteria are displayed with a list of properties. Each property featuring on the list will have at least one image, a title one line description and a more details area with a button to read more. The web site design will present the list in a way that the page does not look cluttered and hard to read. Click on the read more button and the web site page focuses more on the property with more images, a location map and a contact seller or estate agent button.

Property search sites are database driven web site design packages. Properties are uploaded on the database through an admin area and online clients search the database through the search criteria described above. Let us look at the back end or admin area of the web site design used by the webmaster, in this case the estate agent, to enter properties on the web site. Simplicity is the key here. Estate agents are not only busy people but the personnel are not IT professionals. If the web site design system is too complex and tedious to use, they will not keep the web site up to date and in time this will be the downfall of the web site.

Basically, any member of staff from the estate agent should be able to upload information, i.e. property details, on the web site easily. From the web site design angle, the system must be simple, user friendly, robust and secure. Start with a simple access to the admin area. The web site will have a url where a username and password allows direct access to the property upload feature. Fill in the information fields with the property information that will appear on the web site, upload a few photos in the admin area, click a button and the whole lot is instantly online. The web site admin area will feature a list of properties with a delete and modify button next to each property. This will allow staff to keep the properties online up to date.