Ecommerce website development: How can I create one for my business?
Narek Bayadyan • Updated on Oct 26, 2021 • 7 min read
The recent predictions state that eCommerce market volumes are approaching $5 trillion in 2021. Imagine how big your chances are to take your pie out of that profitable field if you manage to create and successfully operate a well-designed eCommerce website.
We know there are many questions you have:
- Where should I start?
- What should my website have to be considered good?
- How much will I need to spend on creating it?
This article will try to address the above questions as well as others you might have.
A myth that it's hard
Many people still think about eCommerce website development as something that should cost very much and require hiring a big team of coding professionals. But this article is not about the traditional methods of website development. Here, you will read how to create your dream web presence with no coding skills within several hours. Also, spend significantly less money than the expected market average.
What is different with eCommerce websites compared to other websites?
That's not a breakthrough that every website should be designed to have a convenient and smooth user experience in mind. Whether you create an informative or any other type of webpage, testing it day and night until it's objectively convenient is a must.
If you want to start an eCommerce website for healthcare professionals, the smooth user experience becomes a serious point or imagine that you are creating a platform almost identical to brick and mortar. Your eCommerce website visitors, particularly healthcare professionals in need of modern scrub wear, should have the opportunity to see the products properly, ask opinions, navigate through the available options, and seamlessly proceed through the payment and review stages.
In this regard, choosing the right eCommerce website development tool is vital. You need to pick up a trustworthy one, which will grant you enough opportunities for implementing your creative ideas technically.
Main types of eCommerce websites
B2B (Business to Business): As the name implies, companies buy from businesses here. On such websites, pricing is usually for products in bulk, and there are discounts for high purchase volumes. You can take Alibaba as an example.
B2C (Business to Customer): That's the type of eCommerce website you probably visit often. All the platforms where we explore and buy the products as customers take place on B2C stores. Here businesses sell their products to non-commercial customers.
C2C (Customer to customer): These platforms allow individuals to list their offered products and sell them to others. For example, Etsy is a C2C website, as there are no businesses that sell something there. Customers make all the offered products for other customers.
C2B (Customer to Business): This type of platform is usually not very common. They include cases when individuals sell products or services to businesses. You can take freelance platforms as an example, where businesses are the clients, and freelancers are the ones who offer their skills for sale.
Steps of your eCommerce website development
Take your time to think about what you are going to develop.
Identify what you are going to sell and to whom. It's essential to identify your purchaser persona before starting the eCommerce web development process, as far as steps will largely depend on it. You should know all the possible details about your customers. You should understand what will appeal to them visually and which kind of customer journey they will find attractive.
You might spend a relatively long time at this stage of market & customer analysis, but the results will be worth it.
Look at how your competitors interact with your target audience. Analyzing your competitor's websites is one of the easiest yet crucial steps you should take. Nothing holds you and your team back from registering in any of the eCommerce websites you find in the same niche as yours and testing all the UX they are offering.
Fix the main methods your competitors have used to provide the convenience and abundance of features to users. This will give you a general insight into the quality standards within your industry.
Most importantly, train your brain to identify the gaps each eCommerce website will undoubtedly have, even the most successful and popular ones. If your website manages to keep in line with the accepted standards and fill in the gaps existing in the eCommerce industry, a fair portion of your success is guaranteed.
Move to technical part | Choose the proper toolbox
If you've completed the two steps mentioned above, you should have at least 85-90% of your eCommerce website ready. Then, it's time to turn your idea into a properly operating website, where the crucial role will play the website development platform you choose.
Speed, security, and scalability are the classics for any website. Therefore, do thorough research on eCommerce website hosting platforms to choose ones that will not cause breaks in the operation of your website.
A good server should have enough capacity to support your website loading speed. This will pay off both in terms of customer satisfaction and SEO.
Also, you need to have a highly scalable hosting provider. It will not go down if the website traffic becomes unexpectedly high. eCommerce website breakdowns during sales or holiday seasons are what happens quite often. Therefore, make sure your website will not cause the same issue in advance.
Cooperate with a professional website developer
No-code website builders are the breakthrough of the technological era you can't miss!
If you research understanding the estimated expenses of traditional eCommerce website development, the approximate image would be as follows:
Website design: 2,000-8,000 USD
MVP development: 8,000-30,000 USD
Website testings: 2,000-5,000 USD
The above calculations exclude the other related expenses you should take. Such as the services you would need to buy for successful website marketing: SEO, content development, advertising, etc.
Tieing up altogether, you would spend around 10,000-25,000 USD for building a small website and about 50,000 USD if you aim to have a high-load scalable web solution.
Add the probable percentage of professional misunderstanding, delays, and human-made errors that usually happen when cooperating with developers.
Now put the no-code solutions at the other end of the scale.
At the beginning of this article, we have promised you will read about a significantly quicker, and more affordable option for eCommerce website development. Here it is.
With the no-code website building software, you need three inputs: your time, computer and the internet connection. The tool does all the rest.
Take Softr as an example. It allows you to create websites within minutes, as the platform already implements lengthy back-end processes.
You can choose any of the templates
Build your E-Commerce site today
Proceed with Softr's E-Commerce template and have your online store ready in minutes.
Or use the excessive customization options.
The available features include all the main aspects for creating a successful eCommerce website:
- Payments
- Memberships
- Search, filtering, sorting
See websites developed with no-code tools
Referring to others who have similar experiences will help you navigate through the no-code website building journey easier. You can read how Softr helped KidsCircle create an online marketplace for childcare services without heavy investments and several months of development work.
Start developing your dream eCommerce website.
You are one click away from having your website ready within the next few hours. Start your free trial and refer to the video tutorials for any questions you might still have.
