by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: October 31, 2009

Having an online shop is easy, and many people choose to build a basic e-commerce site as an additional channel for their sales. However, to make the most of your online shop, specially if you aim to make it your main sales channel, there's some other factors that need to be taken into account.

The first step to make your online shop a success is to choose the right platform to power it, and give it a look and feel that is both attractive and suitable to your products and your company image. There's many e-commerce platforms that have a history of being robust, secure and easy to manage, both open source and commercial. By making sure your website is powered by a reliable platform your online commerce won't go offline right when your customers are trying to shop, and will keep their data (and yours) secure. But no online shopping platform is safe from hackers, so you must keep its software updated when new versions and bug fixes are released.

The most important thing for the success of an online shop is making sure the ordering process is simple, easy to understand, quick and secure. This will build your user's trust, and reduce the amount of orders that are abandoned before being finished. Using a secure connection with a digital certificate for the checkout process will go a long way about making your customers feel secure. By using web analytics, you will be able to follow your users path through the website, and see if there's any page on the checkout process that has too high of an exit rate. Do your customers fill their shopping baskets with products, but then leave without actually purchasing them? That may be because they don't know how to access the checkout process. Before making your online shop public, make an order yourself and see how long it takes, if it's too long you may want to reduce the amount of clicks and screens the user needs to go through in order to purchase. Options such as remembering data for existing customers and one click ordering will greatly reduce the chances of your visitor leaving due to boredom or distractions.

Another thing that goes a long way towards increasing your online website sales is making sure the pictures of each item and their descriptions are professional looking and of high quality. Users who shop online don't have the chance to touch the product and try it with their own hands, so they rely on the pictures and the information on the product page. If the pictures don't look professional or are too small your

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