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 Selling products on-line requires a very different setup from your own run-of-the-mill blogging site. Lets look at the things you'll need to think about when creating an eCommerce website and help to spell out why they cost more to design lightweight sunglasses.

First i'd like to let you know what we're not planning to cover in this article.

We're not assuming that an eCommerce website is a single web page with some PayPal button codes inserted onto it.

The PayPal buttons are great and work well for those selling a small number of items, but we're taking eCommerce to another location level and giving the customer a much better on-line shopping experience.

Most modern eCommerce website are applications. They've a user interface, administration settings, store data in a database and follow a work-flow of processes. We're going to the touch on many of these areas.

The Basics
An eCommerce website can be considered as a play with actors performing it's scenes.

The key actors within an eCommerce website are:

* The Customer - buys products
* The Website Owner - ships bought products & gets paid
* The eCommerce Application - interface between most of the actors
* The Payment Gateway - handles payment transactions (more with this later)
* The Merchant/Business Bank Account - Website owner's business bank-account (more with this later)

The key buying process of an eCommerce website ('the play') happens as follows:

1. Customer browses product catalogue
2. Customer adds product to basket
3. Customer buys product and enters check-out process
4. eCommerce Application contacts a Payment Gateway
5. Payment Gateway provides secure customer shipping and payment details entry form
6. Customer securely enters shipping and payment information
7. Payment Gateway contacts Website Owners' Merchant Bank Account
8. Merchant Bank Account processes payment transaction and returns control to Payment Gateway
9. Payment Gateway returns Customer to eCommerce Application
10. eCommerce Application notifies Customer of successful (or failed) payment
11. eCommerce Application notifies Website Owner of purchase
12. Website Owner ships product to Customer

Needless to say there's much more detail going on in each step, but hopefully you get the general proven fact that creating an eCommerce application is a touch more difficult than your regular blog-style website.

Where Do You Start?
Sounds silly right, nevertheless the first faltering step you should do is think about the forms of things you'll be selling on-line.

Are these products?, i.e. physical items that require packaging and posting or services provided by yourself or another provider e.g. Professional Yak Grooming.

How may products or forms of services have you been going to offer? Local or International? Are some seasonal? Have you got a finite stock level for particular items? Do you plan to make use of promotions & discounts? Can you even like yaks?

This contributes to customer and payment questions.

Who are your web visitors? Where are they? How are they going to pay; credit card, cheque, PayPal? Which bank-account will I need to set up?

And then there are the support questions.

How do you handle returned goods? How do you refund payments? How do you handle complaints?

Having a think about the products and services you're going to offer is essential because the first thing a net designer will probably ask you when you're requesting a quote is "How a lot of things have you been selling and to whom?"

This is because of course time and costs.

Selling 50 products to a UK only customer base using PayPal requires a very different setup and hence costs, to at least one selling 1000+ products internationally and taking credit card payments.

Lets look closer at a few of the important eCommerce application areas.

The eCommerce Application
Essentially, an eCommerce application is a bespoke Content Management System (CMS). So along with updating posts and blogs it specialises in updating products and services and supporting commerce functions.

Like any CMS, the application splits the eCommerce website into two major parts; the front-end or shop-front where the customer can browse and buy goods and the back-end where you login to an administration dashboard and manage the web site options, including the item catalogue.

The Product Catalogue
This will probably be your most important concern and is central to any eCommerce website design.

The item catalogue is where all of your goods-for-sale data lives. The item name, description, cost, stock level, pictures etc. are all stored in here.

We sometimes get people asking which files their products are stored in and they get in bit of a tizzy when they can't see them on the server.

Usually, product catalogues are stored in a database, but don't worry - you don't have to find out how to employ a database. The eCommerce application does that for you through the item catalogue interface in the Administration Dashboard.

Being able to manage this yourself is essential, otherwise you'll be returning and forward to the net developer and the costs will rack up.

Thankfully, the eCommerce applications that we use, Magento and Wordpress e-Commerce, once installed, allow you to manage your own product catalogue from within the net browser.

The Magento product catalogue has advanced options and enables things such as adding discount codes, customer reviews, product videos etc., whereas the Wordpress e-Commerce catalogue provides a simpler solution while still covering the primary requirements you'll need to offer stuff on-line.

So how do you begin entering and updating all the product information?

The Admin Dashboard
Accessing a particular web page on your internet site and entering a username and password will get you to the options part of one's eCommerce website. This really is commonly known as the Admin Dashboard.

Here, you will have the ability to update almost all facets of the web site including accessing the item catalogue, shipping costs, currency exchange rates, payment gateways, sales reports etc.

Whichever eCommerce solution you choose from us, we'll setup some or your entire product catalogue and make sure that customers can buy items and that you get paid via a payment gateway (more on that late

The Shop Design
Needless to say your shop will need a look and feel to fit in with your company brand.

Again, exactly like other CMS's a net designer will undoubtedly be needed to develop a theme or template which will transform the default shop-front into whatever design you have in your mind for the customers.

Themes can be bought off-the-shelf for both Wordpress e-Commere and Magento and you can apply these yourself, however, you may prefer to have a design exactly the manner in which you imagined it and distinctive from all of your competitors.

Themes are applied from the Administration Dashboard. You might be able to improve a few aspects of the theme, such as for instance your logo, background colour, text colour, however, you're not planning to have the ability to move elements of the theme around to different areas of the screen. A net designer should try this by updating the theme's code.

Domain Name and Website Hosting
You'll of course need a domain name to trade with and a hosting intend to store the web site files and databases.

It's usually best not to purchase a hosting plan until you've spoken to a net designer and they've given you an idea of the best means to fix implement.

Lots of the cheaper hosting plans which can be offered to you when purchasing a domain name, don't support databases or database applications. They may charge an additional setup and yearly fee for setting this up.

So stay away from investing in a hosting plan before you communicate with a net designer and have an idea of the type of eCommerce solution you'll need to implement your ideas lightweight sunglasses.