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…

Starting an online store has become the very trendy thing to do recently, however, most new shop owners are misguided, make rash decisions and lack the understanding and research necessary to be successful in their online business.  This series of 5 posts will hopefully serve as a guide to developing your own online store as painlessly and successfully as possible.

So you want to be a Shop Owner Part 2

There are basically 3 options for choosing the software or platform to run your online store…

1. Hosted E-commerce Solutions - These are shopping carts such as Yahoo Stores, eBay Stores and Nexternal.  These platforms have at least the catalog end of your business hosted on their own servers.
2. Self Hosted Static Carts - This is a cart you host and build using a static catalog and for example the PayPal shopping cart system. You maintain this store.
3. Self Hosted Shopping Cart Software - These platforms may be open source or purchased software, but you host and maintain the site yourself.

Each platform has some pros and cons to consider.  So lets dig in to how these solutions will work for you…

The truth of the shopping cart decision is that MOST businesses need more from their online store.  Things like enhanced shopping cart functionality and cross selling, order processing and shipping tracking systems and even multiple product options are generally required.