Guide to Selling Products & Services Online

Looking to sell online? In the jargon d’internet, you will be looking for what’s called an “E-Commerce” site. By the way, “E” stands for Electronic.

If you are planning to sell anything online you need to think about one thing above all else … CREDIBILITY.

Everything about your website should underpin this. This is also important with a standard brochure website but less critical. Remember, you are trying to get people to part themselves from their hard earned cash. Many visitors are actually on your website looking for an excuse NOT to purchase as opposed to the other way around. Don’t give them one!

3 Steps to a Credible website:

  1. Design look and feel: This adds to the cost but the more you can spend on high quality design the more credible your website will look. If you need potential customers to find you via search engines, your web design company will need to balance this requirement very carefully with the search engine optimisation that will also be required.
  2. Functional design: Online buyers can be impatient. They want to find the information that they need (e.g. product specs, prices, delivery times, stock status, etc) as simply as possible or they will simply leave your site and head elsewhere. Proper planning at the start will ensure that your website is correctly structured with intuitive navigation and other required user features.
  3. Payment security: Buyers are nervous about payment methods. You need to reassure them that your payment system is secure. This will usually mean partnering with a third party payments processor such as Paypal or Realex. Your order processing must be simple yet totally reliable.

In practice, many entry level and even mid-sized e-commerce sites now use off-the-shelf backend technology. This keeps the costs down and also improves reliability as the programming code has been tested. It places a greater onus on the front-end design and this has meant that the overall standard of design of e-commerce websites has risen sharply in the last two years. Customers’ expectations have also risen in line with this and they are no longer willing to settle for poor site design even if the site works quite well.

Check Out Our Other Guides

Below is a list of other guides that you may be interested in reading:

  1. Website Design and Development
  2. Content Management Systems (CMS)
  3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
  4. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  5. Selling Products & Services Online
  6. 11 Tips for Choosing Your Web Design Company
  7. Common Mistakes with Website Projects
  8. Email Marketing & Information Marketing
  9. Fixing What's Wrong With Your Existing Website
  10. Social Networking Websites