7 steps to Build an eCommerce Website

In the age of the internet, eCommerce is attracting more and more customers. An online store is becoming a crucial element to any business plan, but starting one can seem to be a monumental task. This article will give you some simple steps to get your store up and running in no time.

Amanbo is an international e-commerce platform that focuses on China and Africa two-way trading, this online mall provides African buyers a wide range of high-quality Chinese goods. The first branch - Amanbo.co.ke was set up in Nairobi,

1.Decide What You're Selling. You should consider narrowing your scope to capture a niche market, however, not so narrow that it's hard to find customers. For example, if you are thinking of selling books, selling vintage books might be a better option. On the other hand, only selling 17th century Mongolian ghost stories probably won't take you very far. If you are serious about your online store, you will probably spend a lot of time constructing and tweaking your website and especially marketing it, so choose something you have some interest in.

2.Select a shopping cart. The shopping cart software allows you to set up your products and services for sale on the Internet. There are many commercially available shopping carts available to choose from. You will want to select the cart that offers the functionality you are looking for.

• You will want to look for a cart that offers merchant tools, supports many payment options, offers configuration for shipping and taxes, offers real-time statistics and reporting, and has the appropriate security.
• You will also want to select a shopping cart that is compatible with your payment gateway. This will illuminate the cost associated with integrating your shopping cart and merchant account.

3.Choose your Ecommerce platform. There are a ton of options out there, so before you choose you should sit down and decide exactly what features you do and do not want in an online store.

4.Set Up Your Store. This is where the work comes in. You'll need to get all of your details together and sit down and fill out all of the necessary information. All of the above mentioned sites are easy to use and don't require much tech savvy.

• Enter all your products, payment options, shipping options, applicable taxes, etc first. Check and double check them; it doesn't matter how good your site looks if the customers can't use it. That being said, it is extremely important how your site looks. Obviously, you need to make sure it is professional and aesthetically pleasing, however, you also want to make sure it is easy to navigate and find products.
• You should organize all of your products into intuitive categories and sub categories. If your hosting site has "featured products" or "best selling products" options, you should set those up as well. You should visit your store front often and try to navigate yourself frequently during the set up process.
• Having friends and family test it out can also be quite helpful in figuring out any problems with your layout or checkout process.

5.Set up your payment gateway. The payment gateway is the application that connects your website shopping cart to your merchant account. The job of the payment gateway is to collect the credit card information from the customer, encrypt it and sent it to the merchant account for processing.

• When selecting a payment gateway you want to select one that is compatible with your shopping cart, offers good pricing, has the ability to facilitates all 
• payment functions (payments, voids, refunds, etc), offers robust fraud protection, is PCI compliant and has an interface for you to run reports on your sales.

6.Select a merchant account. The merchant account’s job is to authorize the card that is being used for payment and then deposit those authorized transactions into your bank account. It’s important to choose a merchant account that offers good rates on processing, has 24 hour turn around on settled transactions, offers live customer support, has high approval rates and low merchant attrition. You want a processor that stands behind your account and consults you as to the very best way to set up your eCommerce website.

7.Market Your Store. There are a lot of stores out there, so make sure to market, market, market. An online store is not like physical store where people will just pass by on their way to other things even if you aren't advertising.

• You will need to make sure to use a lot of keywords in your store text and create many back links (links to your store from other sites) in order to drum up traffic and move your way up the search engine results.
• First you should research keywords by searching for them in Google or Yahoo! or your search engine of choice and gauging the popularity of the keyword. If it gets millions of hits in .25 seconds, it's going to be very hard to climb up the results and get your store seen. At the same time, if it gets 4 hits, odds are you aren't going to drum up much business that way either, so be sure to choose a happy medium.
• Once you choose your keywords, be sure to use them! Blogging is a great way to do this, especially if you are posting relevant, interesting posts and not just advertisements. For example, if you have a vintage book store, you might have a blog where you discuss interesting passages or tidbits or articles about vintage books with links back to your store. #*Make sure to use your target keywords in your blog frequently. You'll also want to get as many subscribers as possible and try to get as many people as possible to link back to you.

How to make shopping online

Online shopping is a best way to save time and get unconditional discounts, it helps you getting better prices and finding an item that’s not available in the market or stores.

Imagine shopping before the trend of online shopping was launched. It was never so convenient for us to shop products before the online shopping came into introduction. Physically visiting stores, suffering, travelling long in critical conditions and getting tired were the parts of shopping in old days. Through online shopping, we are having access to different stores, brands, products and services from all around the world.

Although, the online shopping has become very common now but some people still worry about it and consider it as an unsecured move without experiencing it. It is purely a secured process and improving its security measures day by day as the technology is growing more advanced.

1,Have a solid research before making an online order for any product. Use different search engines to increase in your product-knowledge and try searching for different shopping

engines.

2.Have a well-determined budget before placing an order. Watch out all the online shopping terms like tax and shipping.

3.Make strong analysis over the product you are going to purchase. This will determine if you need a long lasting product or a product that will just get you through the year.

4.Browse for some online websites after having an idea of what you want and where you want to get it from. Get a detailed overview of the website and check what options can be suitable for you. There are different standards available on different shopping websites, you can search your required product categorically and by size, style, price, color and a variety of other factors.

5.Go through the online reviews if available on the website from the stores. You can get a firm knowledge for the product you are going to purchase from the online reviews.

6.Search through your choices closely. Once you have found what you need, click on it. You can add numerous items to the cart or a wish-list to get back to. The items added can always be deleted if you decide you aren’t going to buy them.

7.Provide the necessary information required and pay. Usually paying through credit card is allowed on all the stores, but some work with PayPal or electronic checking as well.

8.Determine your shipping preference, product shipment usually takes longer time. You may find many sites that offer free shipping.

9.You get a confirmation email after the order is placed, check that out.

How to start an online shop

If you're ready to be in charge of your own destiny, but don’t have the capital to buy a franchise or open up a storefront, consider starting an online business. When your store is online, you can reach millions of customers instead of whoever happens to wander in - plus, you don't have to pay for retail space. However, like with any business, you'll need an excellent product and a solid marketing plan. See Step 1 to learn what it takes to start your business online.

Part 1: Setting Up Your shop

Define your product or service. Starting an online business gives you the benefit of having access to millions of customers, but you also have a lot more competition. No matter what you're trying to sell, you can bet that hundreds more online retailers have a similar idea. What differentiates your product from other similar products? To help your product stand apart from the rest, you'll need to find a niche.

1,Offer expertise in an area. Even if the product itself isn't very unique, your expertise might be a strong selling point. If you're selling a line of skincare products, for example, it helps if you have a degree in a field related to skin health.

2,Check into the competition. Figure out what isn't already being offered, and find a way to fill the hole with your product.

 Part 2: Creating your online store

Register your business.  Your online business needs to be registered according to your state's laws. Choose an official business name and fill out the appropriate paperwork to make your business official.

1,Before you register your business. it can help to have a business plan laid out. Consider your production costs, shipping costs, taxes, and web hosting fees.

2,Know the business regulations in your state. and be sure to comply when you get things up and running.

3,Name your shop and goods.Like the name of any other business, go for something short and catchy that will be easy for people to remember. Visit the website of a registration company and test out some of the names you're interested in to determine whether they're available. Once you land on a good name, go ahead and register it.

Part 3: Selling your products

1,Be social. Whatever your business, whatever your venue, keeping your name in the the air is key to internet success. Have a business account on Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In. If your business is graphically oriented, Whenever there is news of any kind—a new contract, a new page, a new entry, a new photo—cross-post it to all your social media sites. Also make sure those sites link back to your main website, and that your website has links to all of them.

2,Become an wholesale marketer. There are many companies and webmasters who use online wholesale programs to boost their online sales, and most of these wholesale programs are free to join. When you sign up for an affiliate program, an affiliate link with a unique affiliate ID will be assigned to you. The affiliate link is used for marketing the products of your merchant. When a visitor buys an item through your wholesale link, you earn wholesale commission.

   For example, if you are an distributor partner In Amanbo E-commerce platform,As an online clothing wholesaler you can advertise your products on their site. If a person visits your shop page, and clicks on the link that takes them to the Chinese Clothing page, and they purchase an t-shirt within a certain amount of time, you get your order profit on the sale.

Build An Online Store Like A Pro

 It is a quite common misconception that if you build an online store on your own, it will end up looking homemade and unprofessional. That might have been the case a handful of years ago. But these days, there are web-store building tools at your disposal that are extremely powerful and fairly easy to use. A person who is not a programmer can in fact build a professional-looking online store. All you have to do is follow a few tips and

guidelines:

  

Tip #1 When preparing to build your online store, consider that most modern, high-end websites are relatively wide in size format. A lot of this has to do with site owners and programmers taking advantage of increased screen real estate as the prices of wide monitors have dropped. I've found that 960 pixels is just about the perfect width. It's a very balanced size and you'll find that many of the huge sites out there, such as Yahoo and MSN, hover right around the 960 pixel mark. Yahoo is actually a little narrower and MSN is a little wider. So, if you build your online store with a 960 pixel page width, you'll be in a range that your customers are likely both familiar and comfortable with. Interestingly, most of the store building tools that are intended for non-programmers come with a default page width setting of around 720 pixels. So, be sure to change that before you start any of your design and layout work.

Tip #2 To help you choose the colors of your online store, utilize one of the many free color scheme guides and utilities available online. There are professionals out there who have thoroughly studied color usage and combinations. So, there really is no need to make any guesses at what colors work well and are visually appealing on a computer screen. People have already figured that out for you... Just search online with a phrase like "web color scheme" and you will soon find some great palettes to use as is, or to modify a bit with your own personal touch.

   The other thing to keep in mind about color choice is that you want the palette to appeal to the majority of your targeted customer base, and not just to yourself. So, it's important to enlist the help of a friend or two to review potential color palettes with you. Also, note that research has shown that women and men literally perceive colors differently. Therefore, if the online store you want to build is geared more towards one sex or another, definitely obtain color opinions from people of the most pertinent gender.

   Tip #3 For many people, one of the most daunting aspects of building an online store is the challenge of designing artwork or graphical page elements. But luckily, there are many "stock photo" sites on the web where you can purchase professional artwork and photography for as little as $5.00 per image. Try to stay with "royalty free" artwork and photos so that you don't have any recurring fees or copyright licensing complications. Also, it helps tremendously if you stick with a series of art elements or photos from either one artist or one photographer respectively. This will make your store look more pulled together and coordinated.

  Many of the stock photo companies sell their artwork and photos in varying sizes and resolutions. For online stores and websites, you only need 72 dpi images. So, you can usually get away with buying the less expensive, smaller images. But, if you have access to software such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, and can therefore re-size artwork and photos as needed, you might want to invest in the more expensive, higher resolution images. This gives you more flexibility with respect to potentially re-using the artwork or photos in future projects.

  Tip #4 If at all possible, try to obtain professional photographs of whatever products you are selling. Oftentimes, you can build your store using product images provided by either your products' manufacturers or distributors. This will save you a considerable amount of time because it can take quite awhile to properly stage items for photography. But more importantly, the product images supplied by manufacturers or distributors will help give your store a professional look and feel. Of course, if you are a talented photographer, or have a friend who is one, take advantage of that and produce your own custom set of product images.

  Tip #5 If you have some dollars budgeted towards helping you get your store kick-started, you can certainly find some very affordable online graphic services. There are several companies online that will professionally design a logo graphic for you that you can then easily paste into your website. I've spent from $65 up to about $300 with a few different online logo design companies and I was happy with the end result each time. I think it's very important to have some type of logo in your store header, even if it's just a simple graphic. It makes a site look so much more polished than if you were to just type HTML text in your header with your store's name.

  Summary If you build your online store while following the above tips and guidelines, you will very likely be proud of the end result. You will have basically benefitted from the support of professional graphic artists, photographers, and color specialists. But, you'll still have bragging rights because you will have built your own online store.

Some tips about starting an online shop in kenya

Some tips about starting an online shop in Kenya

 

 Whenever you look around you, have you noticed that everyone wants to sell or buy something? Every day, people place advertisements in the newspapers, billboards, magazines, internet, radio and other platforms of items for sale. You can take advantage of this and turn it into a business idea.

 All you need to do is to seek a platform for all these people to sell their items, and you will make good money. Companies such as Jumia, Amanbo, Rupu, Kilimall and many others have already taken advantage of this by providing an online platform where sellers meet buyers and make sales. It is worth mentioning that, Amanbo is a free platform for starting a online shop, they only get a commission until your order turnover.

 Innovate Your Business and Start Selling Online - following are some helpful tips and advice

TIP 1: - starting an online store can involve some work; you need to manage orders and customers, update and add content, manage marketing and social media, and setup the store. So you need to be able to use the administration and content management system provided. The best way to find out if you can manage it for yourself is to try. Amanbo provide a free system so you can try it for yourself.

What is your business model?

  When you sell online you can support different business models. Typically it will be B2C - Business to Consumer or B2B - Business to Business. Some online stores want to support both. B2C is the basis of most online retail. If you want to sell to other businesses like wholesale or re-sellers then the model will be B2B. The main difference is that not everyone can access and buy from a B2B online store and in general the customer will need a user name and password to login.

What languages and currencies do you want?

  You may only want to sell in Kenya Ksh right now but things can change. The solution that you choose should be multilingual and multi-currency meaning it can support many languages and every currency type in the world. You will need to setup tax, payment and shipping to support your requirements. 

Does your platform you use have legal policies?

 Website terms and conditions and terms of use are a must for any ecommerce website, while a privacy policy is a good idea if you’re planning on using customer information for marketing or to sell to advertisers.

TIP 2: - If you want to accept payment online and collect customer personal information then your online store will need to be secure and support SSL encryption. When taking payment online you will also need a hosting company that is PCI DSS Compliant. If you show that your store is secure it will improve your shopping basket conversion rate.

TIP 3: - If you support multiple channels to market like an online store, amanbo and other shopping portals or even a bricks and mortar store you can improve your results by as much as 300%.

To be Successful selling online you need to have Successful and Return customers

1,Graphic Design - Create a great User Experience .

2,Great Content Means More Customers:CONTENT IS KING

3.Payment Gateway - make sure your customers feel Secure.

4.Shipping and Logistics - get your products to your customers efficiently

5.Connect to accounting systems to automate your business

 

TIP 4:- Return customers cost you less to retain that getting new customers. Return customer's order value is generally higher than first time customers. Offer your customers coupons, discounts and special offers to promote customer retention and loyalty.

 

1,Web Analytics - Visitor and Page Tracking - Know your customers.

2,SEO(Search Engine Optimisation) and ( Search Engine Marketing)- Get your Online Store found by Search Engines

 Search Engines like Google and Bing are responsible for driving 80% of the traffic and sales to your online store. If your store is not set up to be friendly for search engines then you will not be as successful as you want. 

 

 

 

 

 

TIP 5:- Make sure that you understand all of your requirements for your eCommerce business.

 Understand your requirements and learn some of the terminology used by online store vendors. Then prepare a list of your requirements and prioritise them (high, medium, low) this will help you to get a solution that will work best for your business.