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How to Build an Ecommerce Website

Get practical tips to build your ecommerce site — with key features, FAQ, and more.

By Lauren Wallace

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FAQ

Ecommerce website design is the process of creating a website optimized specifically for the online sale of goods and services. Unique features of ecommerce website design include product pages, shopping carts, and checkout processes. To ensure happy customers and good conversion rates, designers must use best practices to make the user experience feel intuitive, simple, and easy to navigate.

The cost of the design and build of an ecommerce website varies depending on the kinds of capabilities and features you need to run your business. For example, a small retail business with relatively low traffic might only need a few product pages, basic search functionality, a simple shopping cart and checkout. On the other hand, an enterprise company that sells a larger catalog of more complex products at varying price points in different regions will need more robust options.

Both before and after the initial launch of your site, your web developers should constantly monitor and update it to keep things running smoothly. These are just a few of the tasks required:

  • Track key metrics to monitor checkout flow and identify the most common places on the site where users stop shopping, bounce from the site, or abandon their carts. There are many tools and programs that can help you track these vital behaviors and inform future design decisions.
  • Regular audits and analysis of your competitors are essential. Review sites, social media, customer experiences, pricing, and market positions regularly to stay up to date with the market.
  • Regular audits are also important for your own site. For example, don’t forget the importance of SEO audits and functionality reviews. For example, just a one-second delay in page load time can decrease your conversion rate by up to 7%. Make sure everything is working smoothly and any problems with functionality are corrected as soon as possible.

The highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0–2 seconds. Ultimately, this means every millisecond you can shave off your page load times can potentially boost your revenue. Here’s where to start:

  • Perform website speed testing to identify any issues that might be affecting your performance. Image size is a common one, so make sure your image optimization process is up to date — and your content team is trained on it.
  • Pay special attention to metrics for product listing pages and product detail pages. Avoid too many products on a page (a best practice is to ensure that the total number of hit tiles per page does not exceed 24).
  • Regularly test your site (along with third-party systems) to see how it holds up under peak visits, searches, and orders, all the way through to checkout.