Check out our latest video Transcript from our Youtube CHannel and if you prefer click on the link to watch the video !
Video Transcript!
All right, so "how do you design an e-commerce website" ? Now, if you are a beginner or you're brand new, you definitely want to check out this video. I'm gonna show you some basics on how to get started online and kind of some of the things I've learned over the past 12 years on e-commerce myself. But I wanna break down 10 specific things that are crucial to the start of an e-commerce business. So, how do you design an e-commerce website? We're gonna dive into that question right now. So welcome back. It is Damian from Marketing Food Online. So as I mentioned in the introduction, I'm gonna go over 10 specific things to help you get a good footing, a good foundation in creating your own website. So if you're brand new to e-commerce and you're trying to figure out what can I sell online? How can I create my own website? And what are the first beginner steps? This is gonna be a great video to watch from beginning to end. Now all the resources I'm gonna show you in this video, 'cause I've got my laptop open here, I'm gonna show you, they're gonna have links down in the description to make it simple for you to access the information I just spoke about. So number one, what to sell? This is always gonna be the first step. I see a lot of information online that number one is always to find the domain name, but that's really not the good thing to do when you first start, because you need to find out what you're gonna sell. Many times if you're gonna pick a really good domain name, it's gonna be based upon what you're actually selling or what kind of a business you're starting. So, don't put the cart in front of the horse. You wanna make sure that you start off with what is it that you're going to sell? Now, Damian, what kind of stuff can I sell online? Well, you can sell pretty much anything to be honest with you. It's pretty amazing what you can actually buy and sell and transact online, but you need to find out what it is that you wanna sell. Is it an affiliate product? Affiliate marketing is something that you can actually get a commission based upon selling a service or product to other people and you get a cut of a commission. Are you gonna sell physical products? For us, we actually sell a lot of obviously candy, snacks, and baked goods. So we actually make our own products and have our own brand online. So in our commercial kitchen, that is what we actually sell, and we sell it only to order. So people place an order online, we make our physical products and we ship it to them. Now, you can also sell digital products, things like eBooks, tutorial videos, downloadable items that can be purchased over and over, and over repeatedly, and you make money from by just creating it just once. So there is a slew of different types of products that you want to make, but you can actually sell pretty much anything. So first, what are you going to sell? Now, the second thing you wanna do is figure out a domain name. As I mentioned in just a minute ago, you wanna make sure that the domain name is kind of tied to pretty much what you're selling. If you're in real estate, you probably don't wanna sell, have a domain that says chocolatechipcookies.com because it has nothing to do with real estate. So, let me show you really quick how you can find a domain name if you're trying to figure out what it is to sell. I got GoDaddy up here on my website, on my laptop here. GoDaddy is a great place to find domain names. You can do it on Shopify. You can to find a domain name on WooCommerce.
Need more info on website design try Googling , "how to design an ecommerce website","e-commerce website design guidelines", and "e-commerce website example""
You can find one on BigCommerce, even weebly.com. There are literally hundreds of places that you can get a domain name. So let's go down here and let's figure out how this works. This link will have also by the way, it'll take you directly to what I'm showing online down in the descriptions to make it easy. So if you had something like chocolate chip cookies, which I'm pretty sure is probably already taken. What they're gonna do is they're gonna search and find out if that website's available. Now, the one reason why I know that GoDaddy is really great, because if you can't find your specific website that you're looking for, they'll give you some options. Now, chocolatechipcookies.com is taken, but .in, there's a lot of additional extensions that you can buy as well at the end of the website. These are all definitely available, okay? So these are different variations with different extensions and even they have premium one as well, .net. So it makes it very easy to locate a domain name, okay? So number three, website goals. What is the goal of your website? Now, based upon what you're going to sell, obviously, if you're in the business of making physical products, again, let's use an example, chocolate chip cookies, your website of your goal, the goal of your website is to make sure that you are obviously selling that product. You wanna grow a brand around your chocolate chip cookies. If you're selling affiliate products, affiliate links, you wanna build a website that maybe does comparisons and compares pros and cons of different products. You can be part of Amazon affiliates.
More resources can be found on ,"best ecommerce website design 2021","ecommerce website templates", "ecommerce website builder""
You can be part of a ShareASale affiliate program. All of these different affiliate programs give you the opportunity to sell a product that you can build a website around and not even have to touch a product. But they would be comparison websites that would allow you to compare different products with different services and then sell them and make a profit. So, depending on what is the goal of the website, you're gonna build upon that based on the product that you're selling. Next up, number four is the theme and design. Now, let me go right back down to my laptop. Every website building platform, such as Shopify as an example, has what's known as themes. These are the looks, the feel, the design of the actual website itself. So when you start selling online, you have an online business, you wanna make sure that that theme conveys what you are actually selling. When you begin to actually sell a product, you wanna make sure that the look of the website conveys the product. So, as an example, I have a great couple here that are actually set up for WordPress. WordPress is another platform by the way that you can build on just like Shopify or WooCommerce. These are fantastic. And let me show you the example of what I mean by what a theme is. In order for your website to look like it is a professional site, look like it is appealing, you wanna make sure that you got the right theme. And you can either get free themes or you can get one that you purchase. I actually have a couple on our Shopify stores and then one on our Weebly store, that is a purchased theme and they look amazing. How does that work, Damian? Well, for like instance, this is one here that shows you beautiful vivid pictures. You have information here about your product, beautiful picture design, easily laid out. It's also easy for your customer to engage with your website and interact with your website. This one runs around $69. Now, do I have to buy every single theme, Damian? No, you don't. You can get some that are around 20 to $30, you can get some that are free. The ones that really look much more engaging and much more easier for your customer are the ones that you pay for, because they're professionally designed and laid out. So that is the theme. You wanna make sure that again, the theme conveys what you're selling. Now this one specifically shows obviously food products. I'll go to one more and then take a look at this one's called Cookely. And again, this one's around $69 and this is an example of a theme, obviously a different type of a layout, different texts, different fonts, social media icons on the top. So, finding the right theme, number four, the right design and theme for your website, that is very crucial because you want to make it professional looking and you wanna make the eye appeal of the actual website, enticing for your customer to even engage with your website. Now, number five, make sure that it is SEO optimized. Now, what does that mean specifically, Damian? Well, I'm gonna show you really quick. SEO stands for search engine optimization. That's gonna make sure that the right pictures, the right amount of pictures, the title of your actual product within your website, the description of the product itself, and then additional keywords or alt text is put into your images. So, when you wanna optimize any type of website and you're creating your own website from scratch, all of these things come into place, because you wanna make sure you get found on Google, which is a bit of a challenge. But, when you start to optimize, you have a better chance of your product being found, and then of course people buying it. Now, here's a great example, and I'm just gonna use an Amazon listing. This is for a protein bar. They've got beautiful pictures. They've used six images of the packaging, the nutritional information. You've got the individual package of the product and a ton of different things on here that are gonna be very useful for the customer to make their decision. Now, up here on the top, you have a title that is definitely optimized. Gives a specific flavor. It gives a specific brand, the title of the product, the count inside the box, how many they get, this is a definitely a great optimized title. Then you wanna go down here and get more descriptive with flavors, brands, items. Now, this is obviously Amazon's platform for how they create listings there. This is very similar if you're using Shopify, if you're using WooCommerce, or any of those platforms, Weebly. When you create the listing on those platforms for your own website, you wanna mimic this type of quality of information. You wanna have great SEO information about the product. So whether it's on Amazon or eBay, or your own website, it doesn't really matter, because it has to definitely be SEO optimized, okay? This is great too, because this also gives an about section. You only wanna go into a few sentences, maybe one brief paragraph about three to four sentences. That's all you need to make sure that it's optimized, because you're explaining what the product is. Now, this goes to say for digital products. You wanna be very descriptive. If it's a digital download or an ebook, you wanna give an exert. You wanna make sure that you've got information about your digital products. If you're selling Amazon affiliate products or affiliate links, or any of that thing, again you wanna make sure that it's optimized as well, because no one's gonna buy a product that they don't have enough information about, okay? Now, number six is gonna be your payment processor. This is gonna be the company that will transact all of the transactions from your website and your customers. That could be PayPal. It could be Stripe, even a handful of other companies that have been coming up such as Payability and so on. They allow you the opportunity to have your transaction transacted and they'll take a percentage. They take a percentage of the actual sale itself, okay? So make sure you have a payment processor set up. Most of those fees are around two and a half percent to maybe three, three and a half percent. If you're paying more than three and a half percent or so for a transaction, you definitely have the wrong payment processor. You wanna look into definitely getting like Stripe or PayPal. All right, so next up is number seven. This is how the actual website is laid out. You wanna look into a website's about page and you wanna make sure that you have information about who you are. This is actually, here let me show you really quick. This is marketingfoodonline.com. So all of the information here on the side is website pages within my website that have specifics on information. Now, if you scroll down, we definitely wanna make sure that you have an about page and social media. So let me show you on the bottom, see this here, terms of service, privacy notice, contact us and about us. These are crucial pages within your website that every website truly needs to have. Reason being, is that company's, people who are buying from you wanna know about your company, or maybe know a little history about how you started. If you're a small or family business, how did your family get your business started? If you have an about page, it is definitely something that's a much, much beneficial to your success online. So you wanna make sure that you have that. Next up is the contact us. And make sure you've got contacts such as emails, maybe even phone numbers or different websites, if there's other websites that people can go to to find out a contact information page. That's something that's crucial as well. We also added a privacy notice. Every website that you design on Shopify or Weebly, wherever it may be, has to have some type of a privacy notice, because people want to understand the information they're conveying to you in the transactions, or even just emails is going to be kept private, and that there's no selling of information or anything of that sort. So privacy notices are definitely something you wanna think about as well. Now, number eight, social media links. Now, as I show you right here, this is actually our blog. This is a blog that we've got set up on Shopify. On the bottom, you see Pinterest, you see Twitter, and you see Facebook links as well. These are very, very important, because any information that you have, or if you have a product, you wanna have it available for people to share it. This is a great way to grow organic traffic to your website that you're not having to pay for. Reason being is that if the customer likes the product, they may want to send it over to a friend on Facebook. That's only free advertising and that only makes sense. So make sure that you have social media icons within your website, also on your blog, on your product pages, on your homepage, on your landing pages, and everywhere in between. Any place that you can put them, you wanna make sure that you have social media presence on there as well. Now, next up number nine, the legalities. Now, if you're gonna operate a business online, you need to make sure it is a business, not a hobby. What do you mean by that, Damian? Well, make sure that you're incorporated, such as you can use inkfile.com. Here's a great website here, incfile.com. A lot of times they actually have free specials where you can file a LLC online and you can actually do it for $0, which is pretty cool. Plus the state fee, the state fee is a fee that they charge to incorporate your business. But if you're running an e-commerce business, you need to make sure it's legitimate and not just some random website, because there's a lot of liability involved with it as well. And if you're selling food products, for instance, and somebody gets sick and you're not incorporated, that could pose a problem for you. So, the legality such as permits, licenses and incorporation and such, you wanna make sure that you have that within your state and you have it right, and you have it set. Inc file, you can create an LLC here for literally in a few minutes for just next to nothing. And also like Inc Authority. This is another great resource. You can register your LLC with Inc Authority as well. And again, all these links I'll have down below, you can check them out for yourself. And they're easy, fast ways for you to actually get a LLC set up. Every single business that you do, including e-commerce, needs to be a legitimate business. Make sure you have insurance. Obviously, if you're selling food products or of anything of that sort, you need to make sure that you've got a food business policy. So have the right insurance policy set up as well. You wanna make sure you have any permits. If there's any local zoning permits within your area, if you're not doing a business from home, make sure you're in a commercial area, and you have the right permits to do it. That's all localized and that's set in your city and the county, so you wanna make sure that you've got those in place as well. Do make sure that you're legitimate guys, you don't wanna operate any type of business online without it being legitimate. So number 10, as I mentioned just now briefly, insurance, you wanna make sure you have the right type of insurance. And if you've got employees, that you're following your state's guideline for workers' compensation. If you've got any product liability or general liability insurance, make sure you get that as well. So these are 10 basic steps to help you get your e-commerce up and running, and definitely answer the question on how do you design an e-commerce website? So if you got any questions about how that works, please let me know down below, and I'll definitely get to it as soon as I can. I'll see you guys on our next video. Take care.