How to Build an Ecommerce Website From Scratch, and Optimize It

Are you thinking of building an ecommerce website? In this blog post, we’ll outline the basics steps you need to take to get your online store up and running. We’ll also provide tips on how to make your website stand out from the competition. So, whether you’re a beginner or experienced ecommerce business owner, read on for essential advice on how to build an ecommerce website and optimize it.

Creating an online store does not have to be time-consuming or complicated. If you want to build an ecommerce website from scratch, then follow these 3 phases. Starting an ecommerce website is a big challenge, but starting an online store is simpler than you might think.

There are various ecommerce platforms that you can use to create an ecommerce website with no coding experience and are designed for beginners. An ecommerce website builder with CMS capabilities makes it possible to create an ecommerce store in a couple of days or even hours.

The three phases you should follow to create a robust and unique ecommerce website are:

  • Research and Preparation of Ecommerce Websites.
  • Build your Ecommerce Website.
  • Optimize your Ecommerce Website

What to consider when creating an e-commerce website?

Creating a website involves more than simply building your ecommerce store. To start an ecommerce store you need to first focus on the budget, what you will sell, and how you will promote your ecommerce website to reach your target audience.

What products will you sell?

Before starting an ecommerce website, you need to focus on what products you will sell that consumers want to buy. Look for a demanded product that will generate a huge amount of profit.

Start with your passions if you haven’t chosen the products that you will sell. If you have knowledge and interest in the products that you want to sell, then you will be more successful. By concentrating on a particular niche, you can reduce competition.

Look for the trending products in your niche. Research about your competition to determine the strengths and weaknesses, and gaps that you can fill. Develop a strategy for the products that you want to sell through your online store.

How will you market your online store?

Before you begin creating your online store, map out your online store marketing strategy. Finding your ideal customers and how you will reach them to shape the vision of your ecommerce website.

Research the keywords, create your brand voice and start building your social media presence if you haven’t already. To market your ecommerce store, look for paid advertising and other various marketing strategies to grow your ecommerce website and sales.

Phase 1 – Research and Prep for your Ecommerce website

Before creating your ecommerce store, take your time to define your brand and prepare a strategy. Here are some important things to consider:

  1. Check if your domain name is available.

 When it comes to creating your ecommerce website, first you have to buy a domain name through a domain registrar company. There are various companies available for purchasing the domain name, such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc. The domain name is the address of your website that someone type in the top bar of the browser to visit your website. The domain name should reflect your company or brand name.

 There would be companies out there with the same name you thought of keeping for your ecommerce website. That’s why it is best to look for availability first and navigate your options before creating your website.

No big deal if the domain name is already taken. Start coming up with creative ways to include the company name in the URL.

  1. Research Keywords and Search Volume

After you have chosen your domain name, the next thing you have to do is keyword research and see what your target audience is searching for, how many people are making search queries related to your niche.

It will help you to know that people search for the products you want to sell through an ecommerce website. If you want to launch an online store that sells reading socks but no one is looking for this, how will you sell? You need to start over again.

Second,  through keyword research, you can understand your target audience’s language, which informs your SEO strategy. There are the best tools available for keyword research. You can use it and find the best keywords related to your niche.

  1. Define your growth strategy

Think about how you will grow your ecommerce website.In other words, what is your plan or strategy for the growth of your ecommerce website? There are a couple of techniques you can use to grow your online store.

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
    SEO helps to rank your website higher on the search engine result pages. If your website ranks at the first page, you can get more traffic and conversion for your ecommerce website. As you already know, websites that are on the second page are rarely visited. So, it is better to follow SEO best practices in order to rank your website higher on the search result pages.

    SEO takes time to show the results, but it is the most cost-effective technique you can use to grow your ecommerce website.

  • Paid Advertising 
    It is the method you can use to grow your ecommerce website, but paid advertising can be costly. It also drives faster results than SEO. Most companies use Google Ads and Facebook Ads to increase their brand awareness, sales, and revenue. If you want to see quick results, then go for paid advertising.

Phase 2 – Build Your Ecommerce Website

After doing the research and preparation for your ecommerce website, now it’s time to build your ecommerce website. But from where will you start?

First, choose an ecommerce website builder; simply go to Google and search for an ecommerce website builder. You will get paid and organic results. You already know the websites that rank higher in search result pages have built some credibility. So, we recommend that you consider them first. Most  website builders you probably know like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and WordPress.

The leading ecommerce solution company in the market is Shopify, supporting 1.7 million ecommerce business websites across 175 countries. It is the best ecommerce website builder you can choose for creating your ecommerce website from scratch.

The best thing about Shopify is that it is beginner-friendly and has everything you need to build an ecommerce website from scratch. From design to content marketing, analytics. Everything is integrated in this ecommerce website builder.

No matter which ecommerce builder you choose, you should now:

  • Purchasing your domain – Do you still remember the domain you picked earlier? Buy it. For a cost of about $20 to $30 each year, you can do this using the ecommerce solution.
  • Choose the theme – The overall look, feel and style of your ecommerce website is given by a theme. This includes things such as color, layout, style elements, and more. The ecommerce website builder provides themes to make it easy for you to choose the theme related to your niche.
  • Assembling your assets – After purchasing the domain and choosing the theme, the next thing is to create the content for your ecommerce website. Put the targeted keywords in your product title, images, and descriptions for SEO purposes.
  • Setting up a checkout process – In order to get sales from your ecommerce website you need to have a proper checkout process. Firstly, get approval for a payment gateway system. After that create a privacy policy and return policy page. Finally, describe how you will be shipping and delivering the products to the customer. Also, develop a customer support system, through which customers can contact you or your support team if they have any questions or concerns.

Phase 3 – Optimize your Ecommerce Website

The one thing is to build an ecommerce website, the other thing is to optimize it.

Optimization means using the best or most effective techniques to optimize your ecommerce website. When we talk about optimizing your website, we mean to increase your revenue and customer base.

Interested?

Here are our top suggestions for optimization.

  1. Create a positive mobile experience

Businesses now need mobile-friendly websites. In order to provide a better user experience to your customers, it is better to have a mobile-friendly ecommerce website to increase your sales and revenues.

If your ecommerce website is not optimized for mobile devices, then you are going to lose a lot of customers. Nowadays, people are spending more time on mobile devices to fulfill the needs and requirements.

One of the most important factors in a positive mobile experience is page speed. As you already know, consumers wait for 2 to 3 seconds till the page is loaded. If your website takes a lot of time to load then, most of the consumers will never visit your website again because you are not providing a better user experience.

According to the Deloitte study, having a fast load website has benefits:

  • Improving website speed increases conversion rates on almost every step of the mobile purchase journey. From the product selection to the checkout.
  • Faster websites encourage people to see more products and purchase more. For retail, decreasing the website load times by 0.1 seconds can increase conversion rates by 8.4%.

More on the page speed, a positive user experience is highly dependent on how consumers spend the time by visiting various pages, scrolling, clicking the elements and how they feel on the mobile. The following questions should be kept in mind while you test the user experience on your own mobile devices:

  • Are the web pages too busy, or the design elements are to be properly resized to fit in the mobile screen.
  • Is the content readable?
  • Do the CTA buttons work properly?
  • Can a user easily navigate the different pages on the website?
  • Is the checkout process working properly, or is it complicated?
  1. Set up Facebook Pixel

If you choose social advertising, we recommend installing the Facebook Pixel. You just need to place a code on your website, and it matches visitors’ behaviors on your ecommerce website ith their Facebook user profiles.

It provides information such as where the traffic is coming from, what devices they used to visit your website, demographic information and more. This will help you  identify conversions coming from running Facebook ads. And remarket those people who have already taken action on your ecommerce website.

In simple words, it ensures your ad is targeted to the right people at the right time. In order to set up Facebook Pixel, you may need help from a developer to paste the code on your ecommerce website.

  1. Leverage all of your web pages

You probably spend a lot of time improving your product pages if you run an ecommerce website. This section is a reminder to not ignore important pages on your website such as post-conversion experience and the customer support sections.

For example, you can add a FAQ page. DO research on commonly searched questions related to your niche and put them on your FAQ page. The consumers will get the answers they want, which is a good signal to Google.

You can also add internal pages to the FAQ. This provides a seamless experience from one page to another on your ecommerce website, which is great in terms of SEO.

Once someone purchases the product from your website, you can use a post-conversion page to encourage more sales, engagement, and revenue.

  • Offer a promotion.
  • Upsell or cross-sell another product.
  • Link to high-performing content.
  • Increase social engagement

Did you know 35% of the sales on Amazon come from upsells and cross-sells?A thank-you page after post -conversion can be successful to boost your revenue for your ecommerce business.

Also, Read

Conclusion

Now you have everything you need to start an ecommerce website from scratch, a domain name, an ecommerce website builder, theme, marketing strategy. Now it is up to you how you will create your ecommerce website, how you will promote, and grow your ecommerce website to get more sales and customers for your products.

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment down below.We are ready to help you.

FAQ

Can I build my own ecommerce website?

In order to create an ecommerce website on your own, you need a domain, a web hosting plan, and an ecommerce website builder.

How do I program an ecommerce website from scratch?

We have discussed the process of how to build an ecommerce website in great detail, in the post above.

What’s the cost of building an ecommerce website?

The cost depends on the ecommerce website builder you choose and the features you want to integrate into your ecommerce websites.

Which is the best ecommerce platform?

Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for creating an ecommerce website from scratch.

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