E-commerce basics

E-commerce is an alternative with great potential and a very promising future. The facilities that this purchasing mechanism provides to consumers have made it the favorite of millions of people.

For retailers, entrepreneurs and established companies, e-commerce represents an excellent opportunity to grow their business.

If you want to start your online store, in this publication we will detail the e-commerce basics that you should know.

What is electronic commerce?

This is any commercial operation carried out electronically via the Internet.

These transactions can be made through websites, mobile applications, or social networks. In summary, a buy / sell operation is classified as electronic commerce if it is carried out online, regardless of the platform used.

What are the E-commerce basics?

Before starting your online store, you must know certain basic aspects of e-commerce, essential for you to create a functional and effective business.

Define what you will sell and what your market will be

One of the first things you should do is define what products you will sell and who your target customers will be.

Before diving into the world of online sales, do a thorough research to find a product with sales potential, and based on that information you can determine what your market niche will be.

If you know what you will sell, you have a breakthrough in the entire process.

Select an e-commerce platform

The next step is to choose an online sales platform to sell your product. There are several options that you can select from, but there are two categories that encompass them all.

There are open source platforms that offer you the ability to modify their source code. This will allow you to configure your online store to your liking and without limitations. However, you will need programming knowledge or hire a programmer.
You can also opt for ready-to-use platforms. You don’t need to customize the appearance of your website, but you can choose from several default layouts.

You should bear in mind that open source platforms involve more investment of money, but you will have full control over your sales website. On the other hand, ready-to-use platforms are cheaper and easier to use.

Design your website

Regardless of the type of platform you have selected, you must create a suitable design for your online store.

You must consider the image of your product or brand, and offer an intuitive and easy-to-use design. Avoid overloading your website content.

Select a payment solution

One of the essential requirements to be able to carry out electronic sales, is to have a secure system that allows you to receive payment from your customers. To meet this requirement you must choose a payment solution.

A very important aspect at this point is that all online vendors must comply with the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), to guarantee the protection of customer information and their payment cards.

The shipping method for the product

Once the purchase has been made by your customers, you must send them your product. For which you must package it, label it and send it properly.

At first you can take care of this whole process to save a little money. But as your a-commerce grows you can think about hiring the services of a company that is in charge of this process.

Optimize your website

In addition to presenting an attractive appearance, the design of your online store should provide an optimized user experience. In this way, the conversion of users to buyers will be much more effective.

Take these aspects into account to optimize your website:

Responsive design for mobile devices.
Efficient and easy product search method.
Quality content.
Safe, fast and easy to use payment system.

Returns process

The returns process is vital in the world of e-commerce.

You must have a clear and visible return policy for customers. This builds trust in your audience. Remember that if you provide an effective returns process, the chances that your customers will return to buy will be high.

Integrate your online store with the rest of the business

If you have a physical store or location, or use another program to manage your business, you should consider integrating your website.

In this way you can improve your business processes such as updating inventory, fulfilling orders, etc.

What is SEO?

The term SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the process carried out to improve the quantity and quality of the traffic of a website, through the results of the search engines.

In other words, it consists of improving a website so that it is positioned on the first page of search engine results such as Google, when users search for services or products related to your business. This will also improve the visibility, and therefore the traffic of your website.

The more visibility your website has, the greater the chances of attracting new and potential customers.

This process is not paid, therefore the visibility of your website will depend on how you carry out the process of improving your content. Search results of this type are known as organic (they are not paid).

How does Search Engine Optimization work?

SEO has two key factors for its operation: people and search engines.

On the one hand, you must understand what people are looking for when they are online, what are the responses they want, what type of content they want to consume, and what are the words they use in their Internet search. Knowing all this will allow you to offer your services or products in the best way.

On the other hand, you must structure the content of your website so that you can deliver it in such a way that search engines can easily find and understand it.

Search engines process

Once the user enters the words of their search, the engines proceed to review billions of content evaluating thousands of aspects to identify the content that can best answer the query made.

Search engines take into account all kinds of available content such as websites, images, videos, PDF files, etc., and use bots to crawl these pieces of information on the web, collect data from them and place them in an index.

Subsequently, the algorithms evaluate the pieces of the index considering thousands of classification criteria, to define the order in which these pieces will appear in the search results.

The algorithms used for the search are developed to give users a satisfying search experience by presenting authoritative and relevant pages.

Why is SEO important?

There are several reasons why SEO is of great importance for any business with an online presence. We describe the most outstanding ones:

It is the most effective source of online traffic. Although social media and paid advertising drive traffic to websites, it is search engines that lead the generation of web traffic.

Organic search results are more reliable. On the one hand, they cover more digital content, and on the other hand, they are more reliable for users. That is why they receive more clicks than paid ads.

SEO is approximately 20 times more likely to generate web traffic than a paid ad. This applies to both mobile devices and personal or desktop computers.

It is an effective online marketing channel. If you properly configure the SEO of your website, it can pay dividends in the long term. Whereas with paid advertising, you must continually invest to get results.

Although search engines are constantly making improvements, it is still essential that you optimize your website for SEO. This will allow you to provide better content to the search engines, so that it is positioned in the first results of the search.

E-commerce basics

E-commerce basics

What is electronic commerce?

What are the E-commerce basics?