With tons of handy tools and readymade eCommerce platforms, creating & launching an online store has become more straightforward than ever. Establishing your online store can work significantly in favour of your brick-and-mortar store.

It’s advisable that you make a professional website that users find engaging and can shop from them seamlessly. While an agency or a developer handles the technical tasks of an eCommerce website development process, it’s vital that you have clear insights into it.

The e-commerce website development process is not limited to creating code. Branding, web design, and business strategy are all crucial aspects of the project.

7 Simple Steps to Launching a Successful eCommerce Store

The eCommerce website development process begins by creating a roadmap of what you want to build. You must have a clear answer to your brand name, the products you will be selling, the conventional payment solutions you want to offer to customers, and more.

Step1 – Products to Sell

With fierce competition, setting up a successful eCommerce store requires a well-defined niche for your business. Whether you want to sell garments, apparel, accessories, medicines, or electronic items, you must research the market for potential growth and the target audience’s preference.

Researching the target audience helps you create services that connect with users and develop effective business strategies. Once you decide on specific categories of products, it’s vital to enlist them. This will help you determine the number of products you will be selling online and offer scope for choosing a viable inventory management system.

Step2 – Develop a Business Roadmap

Without a roadmap for the project, your online business will unnecessarily teetering. A predefined business roadmap will have well-defined goals that help you focus on the core business objectives with practical solutions. Some of the key aspects of an eCommerce business plan are:

Necessary resources
Financial goals
Marketing plans
Growth plan with projected timelines

Step3 – Choose a Suitable eCommerce Development Platform

Once you build a roadmap for the business, it’s time to research and select the best eCommerce development platform for the project. Two main types of readymade platforms suit different business needs effectively.

Open-Source Platforms

Open-source ecommerce platforms are cost-effective options for launching an online store, and anyone with good technical knowledge can use these platforms to build a successful business. On the downside, they suffer from potent attacks from hackers. While using an open-source platform, ensuring a dedicated focus on the security aspects of the eCommerce site is essential.

Popular open-source eCommerce platforms are:

Adobe Commerce (Magento)
Prestashop
WooCommerce
Opencart
Drupal

SaaS Platforms

SaaS-based ecommerce development platforms offer greater security and come with self-hosted services. Compared to open-source platforms, SaaS-based models provide greater ease in setting up and running eCommerce businesses with handy features, payment gateways, responsive themes, different engagement plans, and more.

Popular SaaS-based eCommerce platforms are:

Shopify
BigCommerce
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Wix
Ecwid

Most eCommerce platforms, both SaaS and open-source, offer a headless architecture. This allows businesses with greater flexibility in experimenting with the store outlook with scope for rapid, visible changes. Shopify, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, etc., offer a headless web architecture.

Step4 – Find Suitable Hosting

If you proceed with self-hosted platforms, you can skip this option. However, if your platform is not self-hosted (which is in most cases), you need to find and select proper hosting services for the eCommerce site.

Ecommerce hosting differs from general hosting solutions and offers smooth performance with the proper functioning of various features like shopping cart software, payment processing, handling traffic spikes, shipping, tracking, database support, and data security.

Standard eCommerce hosting options are:

SaaS Hosting
Cloud Hosting
Self-Hosting or On-Premise Hosting
Shared Hosting
Virtual Private Server
Dedicated Hosting

Step5 – Payment Gateway Integration

An online store is incomplete without standard payment options. You must integrate several payment solutions like mobile payment, card payments, etc., which allows customers to shop from the site anytime, anywhere.

Standard payment methods for your ecommerce store are:

PayPal
Stripe
Credit/Debit card payments
E-wallets
Online bank transfers
COD (Cash on Delivery)
Mobile payment

Step6 – Marketing Strategies

For a greater audience reach of your eCommerce store, you need to invest in several marketing strategies –

You can deploy content marketing strategies for good visibility over the search engine result pages. Content marketing involves creating blog posts, long-form content, videos, podcasts, etc.
Social media marketing helps you boost brand awareness and grow your business.
Incorporating suitable keywords followed by link building and content marketing helps you with an effective SEO for the website.
Influencer marketing has become a global sensation and can help you build brand value on an affordable budget. The key is to identify the right influencer who connects with your business and target audience.

Step7 – Launch Your Store

While launching your online store, ensure it looks visually appealing over various devices and browsers and runs glitch-free.

Wrapping Up

That was all about the eCommerce website development process. The overall cost of creating an eCommerce site depends mainly upon the chosen platform and the country of development.

An eCommerce development company in India can build an online store starting from $4000 or above. However, developing the same site in the US can cost more than double.