How to Build an eCommerce Website in 2024? - Prismetric

How to Start a successful E-commerce Website? A Step-by-Step Guide for 2024

how to build eCommerce website

By not choosing to go online, you risk losing out on potential 230 million online customers. The convenience of ordering from the comfort of their home has attracted hordes of customers to online shopping.

An eCommerce website often happens to be one of the best ways to tap the potential of online commerce. The best way to start and launch your eCommerce web portal is to avail the services of a professional eCommerce development company, but you will still need basic knowledge about the eCommerce website creation process.

In this blog, we will answer a common query that all budding entrepreneurs have, how to build an eCommerce website? Let’s start.

Steps to Start and Launch Your Own eCommerce Business

You will need to follow a step-by-step procedure to build a top-notch eCommerce web store. We have mentioned the steps below.

Step #1 – eCommerce Web Portal Research

Market research is an integral part of building a successful eCommerce website. Good market research starts with identifying your ideal customer. Conduct thorough market research to identify the kind of products that your target customers like. Also, make sure to learn about the latest eCommerce trends and list down all that would make a good addition to your eCommerce site.
You can then adjust your product accordingly.

While conducting market research, you should also put emphasis on doing extensive competitor research. Study your competitors on the following parameters to identify their strengths and weaknesses

  • List of products the competitor provides
  • The USPs of the of your competitors
  • The target audience of your competitors
  • Promotion strategy of your competitors
  • Features that are lacking in your competitor’s website

By conducting thorough competitor research, you will be able to identify the areas where you need to focus to garner more visitors to your eCommerce website. Market research will also help you identify the market niche where you need to focus.

Step #2 – Finding a Tech Vendor to build your eCommerce store

Once your market research is done, you will have a fair idea about your market niche, where your competitors stand, and the areas where you need to focus. The next step is to find a suitable vendor who can understand your business requirements and build a suitable ecommerce site. There are countless eCommerce website development companies that can help you build the eCommerce store of your choice.

You can search on websites like

  • Clutch
  • TopDevelopers.co
  • GoodFirms

These websites are aggregators of various website development companies across the world. You can select the most appropriate company from this list as it consists of details like the number of employees, the domain expertise, years in operation, pricing, and location of the eCommerce development company.

Make sure to check the track record of your eCommerce developers by having a look at their previous work. Choose the eCommerce development companies that have delivered projects similar to yours in the past.

These are the companies you would want to work with, as they would know exactly the kind of issues that your project might face and how to solve them. Talk with the previous clients of your eCommerce store partner and ask them about their experience with eCommerce web developers.

Choosing the correct eCommerce website development vendor is essential as this single decision has the power of either making or breaking your project.

Step #3 – eCommerce Portal Discovery Phase

Once you have found an appropriate tech vendor, the next step is the discovery phase. In the discovery phase, the business analysts of your eCommerce web development agency examines your project. Accordingly, from the list of eCommerce features identify and suggest the functionalitites & features that are in trend and essential to include in your eCommerce website, and the technical product requirements.

All this information is then filled in a detailed specification sheet. Based on this sheet, you will get your final estimate which includes the cost as well as the time taken to develop the eCommerce website.

Step #4 – eCommerce Website Design

The eCommerce UI design is an important step in the eCommerce development process. This is the step where the UI/UX specialists of your eCommerce web development company create wireframes and show you how the transition will happen between screens.

In the design phase, you will get to know how your eCommerce website will look. In other words, this is a blueprint of the final product that must be approved by you.

The eCommerce developers will provide you with design mockups that need to be approved by you. In the final part of this stage, the designers transfer the mockups to the developers for further process.

Step #5 – eCommerce Website Development

The eCommerce store development process consists of transforming your idea into reality. In this stage, the team of eCommerce web developers will undertake the coding process and transform your idea into a working product. In most cases, the development work is divided into small stages known as sprints.

Here it is noteworthy that the expert developers make sure to efficiently integrate eCommerce API that is required and as per the set rules of the development project. The length of the sprint is dependent on the size of the project. Normally it takes 1-2 weeks to complete a sprint.

Step #6 – Quality Assurance (QA) of your eCommerce portal

To ensure that your eCommerce website runs flawlessly, it will need to undergo rigorous QA testing. This is the stage where a team of testers examine every part of your eCommerce website and check whether it consists of bugs or not. If the QA testers find any bug, they send bug reports to the developers. The developers then resolve these bugs and ensure the smooth performance of your eCommerce website.

Step #7 – Launch your eCommerce website and market it

This is the final step to build an eCommerce website. The eCommerce web development team will deliver the eCommerce website along with the source code after making the final edits to the product.

Once you have launched your eCommerce store, you now need to ensure that the customers visit your eCommerce store frequently. How do you do that? Through effective digital marketing.

You can use the following ways to promote your eCommerce website.

Content marketing

The aim of content marketing is to improve the SEO performance of your website. Content marketing includes publishing various kinds of content like long-form blog posts, promotional videos, social media posts, podcasts, and more such content.

Content marketing will give a boost to your SEO rankings. Your ecommerce store will gain better visibility through improved SEO rankings. More people will be able to find your ecommerce store when they search for relevant keywords. Thus, content marketing is an effective way to promote your ecommerce store.

Social media marketing

The promotion on popular social media networks like Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook is an extremely effective marketing strategy. SMM(social media marketing) is similar to content marketing, but it is exclusively done on social media networks.

Each social media network is different, and you need to devise a strategy accordingly. For instance, professionals will use Linkedin more, especially during office hours; hence sending long-form informative blog posts will work better on Linkedin.

The same cannot be said about Instagram, where short funny videos will work better. You can consider hiring social media marketing experts to devise an effective SMM strategy for your ecommerce website.

Influencers

Influencers are popular personalities who have a large and loyal fan base. There are food influencers, technology influencers, and home decor influencers, to name a few. There are various types of ecommerce business models, and you will find suitable influencers for your type of business model. Tie up with these influencers and send them products to review.

Most influencers have their own social media channels where they can post their opinions. The idea behind collaborating with the top influencers in the eCommerce domain is to advertise your product to a loyal fan base.

Cost to build an eCommerce website

The eCommerce development cost depends on a few important factors that are mentioned below.

Size and complexity of the eCommerce website

The complexity of an eCommerce website increases as you increase the number of complicated features like AR/VR integration, location-based features, and so on.
As the complexity of the website increases, so does its size. The cost of an eCommerce website increases with size and complexity.

Location of the eCommerce web developers

The location of the eCommerce developers also has a major say in the final cost of the website. This is because there is a huge gap in the amount of money charged by eCommerce developers located in different countries. For instance, a North American e-commerce development company would charge around 4-5 times more than its Asian counterpart.

Apart from the above-mentioned factors, there are other costs associated with an eCommerce website like

  • Website domain and hosting costs
  • Website maintenance costs

Depending on the above factors, the cost of building an eCommerce website can range anywhere starting from $5000-$80,000 or it depending on the future and functionality. This is just a ballpark range, and you should contact your ecommerce website development company to know the exact cost.

Read Also: How much does cost to build an eCommerce App?

Wrapping Up

We hope that we have answered your question about how to create an eCommerce website. Building an eCommerce website is a complex process, and it requires good knowledge of the field. To build an eCommerce site, you must study the market carefully and create an eCommerce site that caters to the needs of the users in the best manner.

Take the support of a top eCommerce development company to build a top-notch eCommerce website. We at Prismetric have established ourselves as one of the best eCommerce developers in the industry today.

We have a team of expert eCommerce developers who will deliver an eCommerce website that proves to be a money-spinner for you. All you need is an idea, and we will be happy to help you in your eCommerce journey.

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