Ecommerce Design

There are many different types of ecommerce architecture on the web today, all designed to suit their specific target audience. After all what good is a beautiful ecommerce website if it isn't selling.
You will find the large brands can at times use complicated navigation and flash based applications which would have devistating results for a smaller ecommerce start up as they are much more difficult to optimise and can often be confusing for shoppers. This is fine for a large brand as their followers will take the time to navigate through the ecommerce categories, but for a small ecommerce operation without brand recognition you have only seconds to capture your ecommerce shoppers. Therefore designing your ecommerce website can be more time consuming than people expect to ensure the appropriate research is carried out with small groups of your target audience. With research you will quickly see which ecommerce layout and strucute suits your market best. Remember keep easy to navigate and as visual as possible.  

Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce without search engine optimisation is pointless, as your ecommerce website is only as good as its rankings. A beautiful site without rankings is worthless, as sales will be limited. To generate high ROI it is vital to ensure ecommerce customers can find your products. There are many forms of SEO and the easiest is on-site optimisation as this can be carried out by non-seo professionals when instructed properly by their ecommerce provider. This will involve optimising all pages, categories and products on your website and ensuring the appropriate text content is on all pages. Text content can be more difficult as keyterms must be roughly 10% of the text content. If the key terms are mentioned too many times it will be seen as spam, if its not mentioned enough then Google won't relate the page to the key term, so its a fine line, but very achievable with a little coaching.

Onsite optimisation is much more difficult and requires alot of research and time to achieve the required result.

Why Try Ecommerce?

Ecommerce is definitely the easiest way for retailers to reach the masses. Not only is it one of the cheapest forms of advertising but it also prevents retailers from having to set up new shops in different counties or countries - one store will do it all. With this global audience in mind its very important to put time and suitable resources into such a project, as an initial investment can really reap the rewards after site launch and search engine optimisation.

Ecommerce PCI

Ecommerce is rapidly changing year on year, so its important to keep up with the latest legislation on security requirements and processing methods. PCI regulations should now be a key factor for all ecommerce web designers in 2011. The problem is, which level is appropriate for your business or your customers. At least now there are more documents available on what PCI actually is and how it should be taken into consideration prior to designing any ecommerce application. Thankfully there are many options available to smaller start up ecommerce businesses that can pass this compliance issue onto a third party and ensure ecommerce is still available to the masses within budget. If on the other hand you have a considerable ecommerce business then self compliance may be the most effective solution and will ensure your site flows and contains and stores all credit card details on your own servers etc. Unfortunately for most ecommerce entrepreneurs this is too costly, so introducing SAGE PAY / RELAX etc or an equivalent to process and store credit card information will be sufficient. If introduced to the site professionally then ecommerce applications can navigate consistently and most users wont even notice any difference.