The fundamentals of building an eCommerce site
Before making an eCommerce site, the merchant must consider multiple factors, including the features, design, and marketing strategy. However, considering the variety of technologies out there, one needs to choose the platform that would fit the goals of a store. Therefore, it is essential to understand all the fundamental steps necessary to launch a successful eCommerce store.
The business side of a store
Setting clear business goals is the first step in creating the store that you need. In particular, you need to understand the scale of your business, what customers are, and how to appeal to them. There are different development demands for the B2C and B2B eCommerce stores. Every development decision starts with the business strategy and end goals. Moreover, it is also important that you decide the scale of your business at lunch and whether it would require expansion in the future. This consideration is crucial because it influences the development process. Thus, before the actual development, you need to have a clear business plan with the established goals and requirements for the store.
Photo by Roberto Cortese on Unsplash
Choosing the technologies
The development process heavily depends on the goals and platform you have chosen for your business. For instance, if you need a simple store and do not rely on the technical aspects in creating and hosting your site, the perfect solution is to choose one of the SaaS eCommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce. Both platforms offer convenient store management and a variety of templates to build your store. Nevertheless, with SaaS stores, there are some limitations in customization and additional costs for the extensions and extra features. Meanwhile, choosing open-source platforms like Magento and building the features with a team of developers might be complicated and costly, but it provides endless possibilities for customization and further scalability.
Since Magento is one of the most popular and demanded eCommerce platforms, learning it would be a significant plus for every developer. Our Overdose Tech Club provides the free Magento 2 course for Backend and Frontend junior developers. After learning the development process of Magento, you might be able to join the team of eCommerce professionals that build saluting for global brands.
Storefront of a shop
The theme development of a store also depends on the platform. Namely, for the custom Shopify theme development, one needs to learn how to work with its template language Liquid and know other peculiarities of this platform. In our article “How can I create a Shopify theme?”, we explained all the methods of creating and customizing Shopify themes. Development of the frontend of a store on other platforms also requires the knowledge of different languages and technologies like JavaScript, CSS, HTML, React, etc.
However, the storefront is not necessarily all about the frontend development. A successful retail store has to have an appealing and convenient interface. In addition, taking high-quality pictures of the products, providing video reviews, or implementing the 360° view on the item could positively affect the decision-making process of customers. Therefore, one may agree that the process of designing the store is the same significant as the frontend development because the appearance of a site is what attracts customers.
Marketing
Marketing strategy is another critical component of every eCommerce store because you need to provide as much information about your business as possible and differentiate it from the competitors. The initial emphasis should be on the SEO of the website because you need to drive traffic from the search results and attract customers. Additionally, content marketing and social media integration could be the deciding factor for the retail stores. Luckily, most of the eCommerce platforms have social media integration capabilities. Especially popular is the idea of social selling in the fashion industry, where you can sell products from social media pages. The benefits of such a strategy is the notion that it makes the customer journey shorter, and it is easier to appeal to the customers with content on social platforms like Instagram or Facebook.
Instagram / Zara
Summary
Consequently, planning the goals, designing, and marketing strategy play as an important role as the development of an eCommerce store. Building a successful website involves the efforts of a team of professionals or the effective management of a merchant. Nevertheless, the important part is also in the decision to choose the eCommerce platform. Although for most stores, SaaS platforms might be the perfect solution, for the stores with the specific features and customization demands, the open-source platforms are the best fit.
