Ecommerce Web Design Blog
How to start an online shop: answers to basic ecommerce questions
Published in shopping carts, shopping cart, ozcart, ecommerce websites, ecommerce cart, ecommerce by oscworks |No matter how experienced you are in business, a step into online business brings new terminology and ecommerce jargon that you will need to be familiar with. If you are not already familiar with shopping carts, ecommerce, payment gateways, merchants and secure checkouts, here is the place you can find out.
In a two part series we will answer the basic questions about Ecommerce that we get asked by new customers.
The three parts are:
- Basic Ecommerce FAQs
- What can you do with a shopping cart?
Basic Ecommerce Frequently Asked Questions
What is ecommerce?
Ecommerce means buying and selling through electronic means - usually through the Internet. Ecommerce websites allow customers to browse through hundreds or even thousands of products, order online and have payments processed in real time, in most cases through using credit cards. Ecommerce is often referred to as an online shopping cart.
Will ecommerce help my business?
Ecommerce can help virtually any type of business. Small, medium and home-based businesses often have limited budgets available for marketing to new customer groups, but ecommerce allows the to reach out to a growing pool of online customers waiting to buy their products online. In Australia, the market for ecommerce is growing rapidly - analysts have calculated growth at about 30% p.a. How much help ecommerce can do for your business is only limited by how much effort you want to put into it. Even when sites are not selling products, they're helping showcase them and support the overall image your business projects to the world.
What is a shopping cart?
An online shopping cart is like a grocery trolley on the Internet. You go through the website like you do a physical store, viewing and putting the products you want to buy into your shopping cart. You can then visit the checkout where you can purchase them online using your credit card. Shopping cart software such as Osc Works' ozCart allows businesses to offer multiple payment options that are processed in real time.
Is online shopping safe?
Ecommerce is extremely safe compared to most physical stores. Physical stores are vulnerable to flooding, fires, robbery, pick pockets, shoplifters and employee credit card fraud. Whereas online, heavy electronic security protects customer credit card details during ecommerce transactions and stores have the option of purchasing strong forms of encryption like SSL (a protocol that creates a secure connection to encrypt information as it travels over the Internet) which allows online shops to use 'https' instead of 'http' in the website address for their shopping cart. At Osc Works, ecommerce websites are stored on dedicated ecommerce servers and stores have the option of purchasing SSL if they wish. No ecommerce system can ever offer a 100% guarantee, but your susceptibility to crime is less when customers shop online.
What software do I need to set up an ecommerce website?
Osc Works' ozCart software is already added into your site when you purchase it. To manage your product listings and the sales you receive, the only other thing you need is a web browser.
Why do I need my own ecommerce store?
If you're selling on auction sites or markets, then your own ecommerce site could save you time processing credit card orders and money through avoiding listing and success fees. It also means you can be selling to customers outside your immediate geographic area (as Internet customers could come from anywhere in the world), and selling when your store is closed as the Internet is open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Ecommerce is also ideal if you're running a small business or starting up a new business.
Do I need to purchase separate hosting?
Not if you buy from us. Our ecommerce packages are all hosted by us, so you get web hosting space on the Internet as well as the shopping cart software as part of ozCart. You also get unlimited email support for administration issues to do with your store, and hosting issues.
Do I need to know HTML to run an online store?
No - you don't need to know HTML or be a graphic designer to run your ecommerce website at all. You manage your site through an easy-to-use administration section of your site, that runs through a web browser.
How much time do I need to commit?
There's a basic rule in business: the amount of time you put in determines how much you will get back. A shopping cart website is an online business so just like a physical shop, the time you spend on it is up to you.
Including usability features can improve your search engine rankings
Published in seo, marketing, advertising by oscworks |Making your site more usable can have the spin-off benefit of improving the indexing of your site by search engines like Google.
Did you know that making your site more usable to the widest possible range of browsers and people can give you search-engine-ranking benefits as well as helping more people access your website. Here are just some of the ways it can help you:
- Link text indexing: When following a link, search engines look at more than the page the link came from and the content of the page they are going to. They also look at the link text that the person clicked on. In search-engine terminology, this is called 'anchor text'. Highly usable sites use meaningful anchor text to help people find the right content and this has the spin-off benefit of increasing the relevancy of your links to key words and phrases in your site.
- Text content indexing: Using more text on a page relative to images not only helps people who need screen readers to view a page. It can also help search engines index your page, because text inside an image cannot be indexed.
- Site map benefits: Site maps help people understand at a glance what content is on your site and how to find it easily. But they help search engines understand the navigation structure of your site and to assess which pages in your site are the most important. This can help your search engine rankings.
- Page title benefits: Having key words in page titles can make a huge difference to a web page's performance in search engines. Using a tool to create meaningful page titles that are different in every page can therefore help your site get indexed and for pages to come up for a wide range of relevant searches. It also has the accessibility benefit of helping visitors
- Image indexing: Each image in your site can be assigned an "Alt tag". This is a short text-based description of the image and display them in browsers that can't display images or have them turned off. Search engines index these tags, which can help increase the ratio of relevant content to search phrases in your web pages.
- Headings improve indexing of keywords: Most search engines assume that any text that is within in the heading tags is more important than the text in the body of the page. Visually impaired people use headings to scan content and load them into text readers. Using heading tags can therefore benefit both visually impaired people and your ability to emphasize important content to search engines.
