How to explain e-commerce? Well, you can define e-commerce business as a business where you can buy or sell some of the products online. Also, e-commerce doesn’t have to defined as a business selling and buying of only physical products because you can also sell or buy some services.
How does that work? First, a buyer searches for the product he wants on the e-commerce website. After that, he pays for that product with his credit card or some other possible way of payment. And after the owner receives the payment he ships the product to the buyer.
But how do you benefit from it? Well, you can benefit from two sides. First of all, if you are a buyer then you have the option to search and buy for products on easy and quick way from your chair at your home. You can also compare multiple products and check their specifications and price and then pick the one you like the best. Another great advantage are the prices which can be a lot lower than at your local store.
If you came to e-commerce website to sell something then you have another types of benefits. Costs for merchants are lower too. You don’t have to pay someone to sell your stuff, you don’t have to worry about paperwork and there is no cost of storage space. So, interested in more stuff? What if I tell you that you can make money by opening your own e-commerce website? Sounds great, right? If you want to know how then I suggest you to continue reading.
How to make e-commerce website?
These types of sites are becoming more and more popular because, as we already said, these sites offer lots of benefits to merchants and to consumers. Making a site like this is not hard and there are lots of similar sites on the internet. But that creates a problem because your site should stand out amongst the others. How to do that? Here are few tips on that:
- Before you start with the creation of your site you need to research the market. And by market I mean the part of the internet that is connected with your site. Check out your competition and try to figure out how to be better than them. You could also check some of the best e-commerce sites and research them so you can learn why they are so successful.
- After you are done with all the research that was needed you have to figure out a name for a domain. Keep it simple because visitors of the site should be able to remember it easily. You should also considering putting something that is relevant to your site to the domain name. After the domain it is important to pick a good hosting. Predict how much space and bandwidth will be needed and find the cheapest but quality option.
- Now you can start with the building of the site. The design of your site is the most important part of e-commerce website. It must look good to attract customers, but at the same time you should keep it simple so visitors can figure out where everything is without getting lost. If you don’t have any experience in designing an e-commerce website then you can hire a professional or simply pick some of the themes which you can find at the bottom of our article.
- One of the other important things is also defining the payment options for your customers. E-commerce site should always have more ways for paying for the products. That will make the customers feel more secure and they will trust you more.
Tips for design of your e-commerce website
Now that you learned some of the basic things about creating your e-commerce website you should focus on something higher. If you follow the basic tips above then you could have a simple e-commerce website by now. But, is a simple website enough to make some money? Will that simple site stand out or it will just fall into the group of failed e-commerce sites? Trust me, it is still not enough for you to make something out of your site. But don’t worry, you are not far away from your goal. If you follow the advices I will list below and apply them to your new e-commerce website then you have a great chance of making some success with your site.
- Options
Imagine that you are searching for a shirt on some site. After a long time you finally find a perfect shirt that will surely look amazing on you. You want to buy it but then you see that it is not available in your size or the color you want. You will probably be so mad that you will just close that site and go to some other. Now, you don’t want that to happen on your site, right? And because of that you should always offer lots of options for your customers so they can filter their search results. For example, when I search for pants I want to filter them by color, their condition, brand and price.
- Remove choice
Another thing that annoys most of the people is constant pressing of the back button. If I filter my search results and narrow it only to red shirt by Nike I want to have an option to remove my Nike option and add, for example, Adidas. Oh and I changed my mind about the color, I want green instead of read. I should be able to do all that without hitting my back button and it is very important that you make that possible at your site.
- Out of stock stuff
Now imagine that I picked out my green Adidas shirt and when I click to order it I found out that it is out of stock. That’s really not cool. To fix this make sure to highlight that some item is out of stock. Don’t ever remove that item if you currently don’t have it, just make sure that your visitors can see that it is out of stock.
- Shopping cart
If you want to review what you added to your cart you surely don’t want to go at the car page every time. And because of that it is important to put shopping cart somewhere on the page in a way that customers can always check what they have in the cart.
- Shipping cost
You are about to buy a perfect shirt for $20, but when you want to confirm your payment you find out that another $5 must be paid as delivery costs. If you have delivery costs make sure you make it visible so your customers won’t be surprised.
- SEO
Every person who done something with websites on internet knows how important SEO is. If you don’t optimize your site well you won’t have visitors and then there will be no money from the site. Carefully use your H1 and H2 tags and inform yourself about all the SEO tactics and advices in order to make your site very popular.
- Social media
Social media is an important part of getting backlinks to increase your SEO score. Put your social media links to your site but don’t place them on somewhere where they will be in the way of customers. But, don’t hide them too because then they are useless.
- Product previews
You should always add some quick preview of your category and pages. Sometimes customers don’t have time to wait for the whole page to load and quick preview could be very useful.
- Simple and clean pages
Why should you make things simple when they can be complicated? Just kidding, each of your category and product page should be simple and highlight all the important stuff on that page. Every product should have its own space with the price, name and small description. Don’t put advertisements right next to products because that will just make your visitors mad.
- Contact
And last, but important advice is to always have a contact information on your site. Yes, you can communicate with your customers over e-mail, skype or similar stuff but when someone has the option to actually talk to the seller the trust level increases a lot and it is more likely that they will buy your product.
Best e-commerce themes for your site
And that’s mostly it. But, if you don’t want to bother too much about designing your page and placing everything on the way it should be, you can always pick some complete theme and just place it on your site. You should still try to make it better with lots of things, optimize it with SEO and communicate with your customers but a large part of the job is already done with finished themes. We bring you 10 of the best. Pick carefully and good luck!
Polishop – Responsive OpenCart Theme
Polishop is a clean and Fully Responsive to use the theme for every kind of eCommerce online shop. I have add Auto Complete Field In search bar part & add custom product tab module, add Accordion in Categories module. Great Looks on Desktops, Tablets and Mobiles. Well Documented with and installation guide. Preview and download here.
Qrack – Responsive Shopify Theme
Qrack – Responsive Shopify Theme is a modern, clean and professional Shopify theme, it comes with a lot of great features that would take you months to develop. It is fully responsive, it looks stunning on all types of screens and devices. Qrack theme is based on Timber – official Shopify framework but taken to another level with many of their issues fixed and multiple functionality added. Preview and download here.
Martha – OpenCart Premium Theme
Martha is a Premium, Responsive OpenCart eCommerce theme with a clean and neat design. It’s perfect for any kind of web shop. It looks great with all types of devices (laptops, tablets and mobiles). Open demo site and resize the browser window. It also includes a Theme Panel with more than 250 theme options and unlimited colors. Preview and download here.
Shopfast – Responsive Zencart Template
Shopfast is a modern, fully responsive and retina ready Zencart template suitable for any kind of e-commerce shop. Shopfast is user friendly and easily customizable to fit your needs. Shopfast is built using latest technologies like HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap3, latest jQuery and Ultimate SEO URL Ready. Preview and download here.
Jekyler – Multipurpose Responsive OpenCart Themes
The Jekyler is a Multipurpose Responsive OpenCart Theme. If you want to have a very unique and attractive design and trying to make your way among numerous store owners, Jekyler is a great starting point for you. The Jekyler with powerful features, easy to customize, power admin, cool effect. We hope you will have a great experience. Preview and download here.
Intenso – Advanced Magento Theme
Intenso is advanced theme with features that make magento even more powerful. Based od Foundation 5 framework, it features a smart responsive design with powerful extensions included out of the box. Preview and download here.
Milano – Fashion Responsive Magento Theme
Milano is a Premium Responsive Magento theme with extremely customizable admin settings. Suitable for every type of store. Great as a starting point for your custom projects. Perfect responsive multistore magento theme.
Untimated Colors Power Admin. This theme includes 10+ extensions. On Home page you can quickly show Bestsellers, New, Featured, Random, Latest and Special products, customizable multi tabs, multi rows, grid, slider easy config in Admin Panel. Preview and download here.
Guenti – Modern & Responsive OpenCart Theme
Guenti is modern OpenCart theme with many options which allows you to create awesome store in few minutes. Some features: Advanced HTML5 and CSS3 animations and transitions for theme elements. Powerfull Admin panel. Responsive Design. +600 Google Fonts includeded with the theme. Unlimited Colors and Patterns. Unlimited own custom Skins. 5 Basic color version. Fluid products grid. Custom block – on product and contact page. Custom module – An additional module that allows you to add any HTML content anywhere on the page. Custom code – allow you to pase your own css and js code in admin panel. New Layout positions for custom module. Retina Ready. Cloud Zoom for better product image view. SEO Optimized markup and layout, and many many more. Preview and download here.
Simplicity – Responsive Prestashop Theme
Simplicity, a specialized Prestashop Theme for fashion store, high fashion store, shoes store, accessories store,… Using light color as background would be the smartest choice for an eCommerce solution for online market. Functionally, the theme would be a great assistant in improving web efficiency. Preview and download here.
Responsive Magento Theme – Adore
Adore is a premium Magento theme with advanced admin module. It’s extremely customizable, easy to use and fully responsive. Suitable for every type of store. Great as a starting point for your custom projects.Simple white background is enough to make product displays stand out, a logical combination of colors and texture, together with reasonable animation effect impress visitors. But the most remarkable thing about Adore is its powerful and useful features. A friendly responsive design, adaptive screen with the new Bootstrap 3 is already very impressive. Besides that, Visual Content Editor allows you to edit content directly on front-end. Preview and download here.
