Custom Ecommerce Blog by Ydeveloper

The ecommerce web development process does not always follow specific steps and stiff, as each project has its own peculiarities and we must acclimatize to them consequently.

Ecommerce Website Development Process

Here we aren't covering the type of shopping carts, no. of payment gateways, and use of shipping methods, you may go for. This is actually a back-end database driven process that runs after integrating these system to front-end, a design made by html, css etc.

Despite making the things easier, we can say that there are some steps already defined. In general, it can be useful if you keep on building any website.

Let's see them in details:

Planning:

To begin you must decide what target audience the website is looking for. This is vital, because the designs and contents depend on this. You may have some questions that we can answer before starts planning, There are…Is ecommerce website targeted for children or adults? Do you access the public Internet from work, from school or from home? How fast is your Internet connection? Do they want to be informed or entertained? Be sure to answer these questions from the start for your website.

Website Architecture:

The website should be well structured, both for the benefit of visitors and for easy maintenance. Plan the website on a slat or schematic, flow diagram type. In this step, you are going to make a map of the site and the ecommerce development agenda.

Do not forget that you should plan website to make a change so that it doesn’t look so simple since most of the websites are constantly changing and well planned website simplifies this process.

Graphic Design:

In this step with the information already collected in the previous steps you design the look of the website, it is important not to confuse the graphic design for web sites that used to print and other areas because of technical limitations (and opportunities) web pages are foreign to most designers trained in other media. The file size requirements, limitations of color and screen resolutions are very different from those that are printed. This is front-end areas and will be designed nicely to encourage more visitors.

Website Programming:

In this way the project has been well defined and the ecommerce graphic design process already completed. Now the application program and the database to join it with the design of the interface as defined previously. This is something like back-end programs that manages your website behind the screen.

Quality control:

All web design professional should have this step in the process, is very important to test the website application exclusively designed to make sure that no errors. The website should be passed through all the web testing process.

Hosting and maintenance:

This step often depends on the type of project, but for a complete project you choose a good hosting provider that includes the ultimate in speed and stability, e.g. Unix / FreeBSD, PHP, Apache, and MySQL. 

Every website needs constant maintenance. Do not make the mistake of assuming that once you are online, everything is already done. If you want people to return to your site, you must add new material to your website, email to respond, and maybe links to update usage statistics that follow. For a small site, this can take a while as little as two or three hours a month.

Maintaining a large site can be a full time job, so you have to consider the cost of constant maintenance within your budget. Working with the same people ensures consistency, a new company or person not have the same working knowledge of your website, so keep satisfying your returning visitors.

I hope this will be useful; we are also consulting on Yahoo Store design and development with a user centric approach mainly focusing usability and information architecture.

Increasing popularity of customized ecommerce websites all over the world will undeniably increase the competition also. There are three top sources of getting traffic to e-commerce website, Direct, Referrals and Search Engine. Not optimizing your website for major search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing mean to lose 70% of traffic to your website. The solution is to design a SEO Friendly eCommerce websites, which mean to have all the onsite and offsite elements of that website should be well optimized. Title, Meta, Product Details, Keyword Rich Content, Sitemap submission to Search Engine, etc., whereas offsite SEO elements or link building is to process of submitting your website to top directories, social bookmarking sites, relevant forums, articles, press release, search engine submission, etc. To create the brand value of your business, aggressively use the blogging and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

For ecommerce solution, the difficulty is that the ecommerce website does not contain all the keyword in the details of a particular products onsite. Therefore, search engine cannot easily find your keyword and you will not get the top position for that keyword. There are certain aspects like unique title tag, navigation, sitemap etc, which will be proper and should follow all the guidelines that a Search Engine friendly website must have. It does not matter you create an ecommerce web design in asp.net, PHP or Java but it should fulfill all the requirements of the ecommerce SEO. In Custom ecommerce website, all the onsite seo elements can be set up easily but in case of the open source ecommerce platform such as Magento, Drupal, X-Cart is not as easy as customized ecommerce platforms.

A set of work can also be ended on social networks. The social media have given a numbers of prospects for website optimization and the end user can recognize forums attainable over there ensuring these possibilities smoothly. They can also be exchanged in when the time and need arise. The social scale puts forward a set of an extent for websites to flourish and their impressive control will protect that the work done on them not at any time proceeds unpaid or unrecorded. It is essential to make the ecommerce development portal a search engine friendly website for it has to be acknowledged, read well so that the inflow of business relics stable as ever.

Many corporations have already used ecommerce development to boost their gains. Let us features it, as many ways as consumers are expecting to pay, we are willing to furnish them. Laying an e-commerce system is not a unmanageable process. You fix an organization system, so you can smoothly revise categories, and then install an order system for processing and payment.

A professionally planned ecommerce site carries out the economic and shipping knowledge easy to manage. Actually, all you have to do is point and click your way to more sales.
To help you drive the sea of rivaling ecommerce platforms and acknowledge the best solution for your business. I have composed this list of top 10 ecommerce features that must have and consumers usually looking for.

Internet is only way of doing business online and eCommerce Software enables for your businesses to execute and manage all your transactions of selling goods and services through Internet. It is use by merchants when they are selling products online and while it was expensive and usually difficult to skin or configure earlier, those days are long gone. Most ecommerce software varies greatly in their depth and inclusiveness with professional features and easy management tools to be used by merchants of all sizes.

I am very much impressed from the historical data of the Ecommerce, which shows the growth in the retail sales incurred by ecommerce year by the year. Let me take you to the era when the business through ecommerce was beginning. At that time, only traditional way of selling any product was popular. The history of ecommerce was interesting, as most of the people do not know that the technology for the ecommerce was established around forty years ago. I am providing here a brief history about ecommerce with its concept, rapid growth and its advantages.

Earlier years, the ecommerce was popular for doing transactions electronically via technology of EDI – Electronic Data Interchange and EFT – Electronic Fund Transfer. In late 1970’s, exchanging information and doing transaction online was the only things that was possible between businesses. Therefore, EDI and EFT were the initial technologies, which executed a new way of business called ecommerce. During 1980’s, we found massive growth in the use of ATM machines, credit cards and telephone banking, which was the next step in the ecommerce development. Now, in early 90’s, the new technology was introduced in the form of ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning, which was last technology for the beginning of ecommerce that we see today. After 1994, The things like DSL – a high-speed internet connection and security protocol introduced, which has made drastic improvement in the ecommerce as the online transactions was become more faster than it was before with more security. This was enough for the retailers to see and predict a massive growth in all the business that was related to the e-commerce business.

Let's see an ecommerce online store works in below illustration...

There are numbers of ecommerce websites introduced in western countries like USA and Europe. Many of them were collapsed and finally it was time when two new pioneers in current ecommerce business, Amazon Store and eBay Store have launched their websites to online community. According to the data, we have books, computers, music, office supplies and other household and consumers electronics was the first most popular categories that people was preferred for online purchasing.

According the all-statistical data available throughout the years, we can see the continuous growth in sales and retailing through ecommerce since it was started and by the end of 2010.

As the popularity of e-commerce enterprises keeps on growing, the technology will only pursue to enhance, making it even simpler to open and manage a virtual online store with or without a the presence of popular online shopping malls and chains. While e-commerce is still comparatively new-found province, it certainly puts forward plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs of all kinds.

Electronic commerce is also famous as Ecommerce. To entitle the 21st century as an E-commerce planet, which is not wrong because, in this century the majority of the businesses are turned as online businesses? Ecommerce is the process of the buying and selling of products or services over the Internet. Conversion of inquiries, orders, invoices, transfer of funds, etc. happens promptly over the internet. Online ecommerce business gains their popularity more and more. In this century, Internet business is going up rapidly. Want to make your product popular over the Internet; Ecommerce is the perfect way to present it to your prospective consumers. If you are still using a traditional form of business, then the time now to shift your business to be online for getting large numbers of buyers of your products or services over the Internet. This will increase your business growth and its popularity. Whether you are in Business-to-Business (B2B) or in Business to Consumer (B2C), ecommerce is the best ways to handle both types of business forms.

There is no way to build an Ecommerce Website, if you are planning to turn your current traditional business into online. So, if you want to turn your dream of developing an Ecommerce website into reality, there are two ways, use the website development platforms or framework such as ASP.net, PHP, Java, etc., or you may use open source ecommerce development technologies like Yahoo! Merchant Solution, Magento Ecommerce, osCommerce, eBay Stores, Amazon Stores, etc. PHP is also an open source platform, which is free to use. Out of all the platforms and open source environment, PHP is the most effective, low cost and efficient tool for small as well as large businesses.

ECommerce Solutions includes various types of ecommerce features like Shopping Cart Solutions, Payment Gateways Integration, and Integration of Credit Card process to customize ecommerce web applications. To cope with your ecommerce business requirements, there are various advantages of running an ecommerce websites as follow,
• The advertising and marketing cost of website or product promotion is very low
• Help to manage product and its price easily
• It helps to manage small as well as large business
• Take few minute to maintain report of each item
• Helps to save time for both business owner and customers
• You can update your customers with latest product or services using mailing facility