E-Commerce for All

Welcome to PRO-Webs “So You Want to be a Shop Owner” Series conclusion # 5 Got My Store in Development, Now What? If you are just stopping by the first time today then you may want to catch up on the previous Shopping Cart Development Guide posts in this series. To sum it up, we have been stepping through the development decisions, processes and shopping cart software options involved in building an online store.

So you want to be a Shop Owner Series Conclusion

By this point your new ecommerce store is in the final development stages and you will soon be able to add products and begin to sell your products. No doubt this is an exciting prospect, but the final development stages and adding your products and categories is by far the most crucial piece of any e-commerce store’s development.  The decisions you make now regarding the category structure, navigation and layout tweaking for your online store can easily make or break any shopping cart project’s success.

Lets get started with adding products and categories.  Whether you or a store development company is adding your products and categories to your store matters little… There are some extremely important decisions to be made in categorization and product grouping.  The biggest problem with this organizational stage of development is the “lack of forgiveness” for mistakes.  You see, once your category structure in laid out and indexed by the search engines, you really do NOT want to change the structure.  Not only do changes of this magnitude cause “flux” for your site’s search rank in Google, but MANY times changing a product category, name or group will cause the page’s url to change.  This can be VERY bad, especially on a large scale and can cause your site to be temporarily pulled from Google’s index or sandboxed.  This sandboxing period in which Google attempts to digest your content and determine if it is trusted can last a very long time. The longest sandboxing I have seen was 90 days.

About the sandbox: While in the sandbox, all or some, of your store’s pages will be pulled from Google’s index.  This “Sandbox effect” seems to be occurring less and less, but for new and low authority site’s the danger still exists. They are not only not search-able, but not in the index at all.  Large scale content and page changes can easily cause this and there is no clear way to remedy it.  The length of time in the sandbox is directly related to many factors within Google’s ranking algorithm.  I believe the most weighted ranking conditions are related to the site’s index score and TrustRank.  In a nutshell, does Google trust your site?

If you happen to get yourself sandboxed, again little can be done but wait.  However, you might build some strong, organic, one way links to the sandboxed pages.  Build and submit a new sitemap to Google and check that you have good PCI compliance type metrics in place, such as privacy page and a proper SSL.  If you are not accepting credit cards, shame on you, but… You do not need an SSL.  However, IF you are going to use one, DO NOT use a crappy shared SSL…

Everyone has an passionate opinion on this one, and honestly most theories are in general correct as there are many very effective schools of thought regarding domain registrations. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to register a domain that will do what you need it to do. Makes sense?

You most easily accomplish this by starting with an honest marketing and business model first. You must answer some tough questions like:

1. What types of services or products will you be selling with your online store? (Now and in the future as you grow)
2. What is your targeted area/region or customer base age, gender…? (Demographics)
3. What other companies will you form relationships with? (Distribution, etc.)
4. What kind of budget does your store development project have? (A real budget… Never over extend)
5. What is your plan for marketing and information distribution? (PPC, local marketing etc..)
6. Is your brand or company name well known or rich enough to include in your domain effectively? (Probably not)
7. What is the potential traffic for your store’s products/services? (What are others in the same niche doing?)
8. How much or deep is the competition? (Who’s on top and what do you have to do to beat them?)
9. Are you serious about making a successful commerce store… or have you big dreams and little execution?

There are a really host of things to consider in your domain name selection… some you can control and some you really cannot. Obviously, domain availability is one that is generally out of your control. If the name you “must have” is already registered, you might attempt to purchase it for a substantially higher investment. I strongly suggest you have a qualified SEO check it out first as there a many tricks and issues which can spoil the deal… and get a domain broker to handle the purchase for you… Would you sell your house using a car salesman?. Then, realize for certain, this is going to cost a great deal more than 10 bucks… So set your budget and stick to it.  Secondly, there are certain rules and restrictions regarding domain name registration.

• Domain names over 26 characters are supported in most web browsers, but many email, programs, and form fields will not be able to handle them. For reasons beyond my comprehension, however, in most extensions you can register up to 63 characters long.

• Domain names cannot begin or end with a hyphen.

• Names can only include English letters, numbers, and hyphens. For most TLD extensions the name must be 3 letters or longer.

Generally speaking, if you plan to target your home country (or another) you will benefit from registering a country level/coded domain and hosting physically residing in that country as well. If you are seeking a global market, then I suggest .com for a business or .net if you have to. If you are an organization or group, then .org would be perfect. In the United States, there is the .us, which I am personally against registering your business with this as it’s main url..