Starting a business is not easy, you have much to think about from products and suppliers to website design and much more besides. 20% of businesses fail in the first year and 50% failing in the first three years, these figures should not concern you if you are fully prepared for the issues that will face you on your journey to building a successful business. Our article will discuss the key issues when planning your e-commerce business solution, whether you are looking to start a small business or work from home.

Making your website easy to use for your customers to purchase can be very difficult if you have no programming knowledge. There are many are so many different varieties of software out there which one should you choose? Below are a number of defining points to consider when selecting your software;

1. Domain name. Your domain name is very important, do not get misguided into thinking that it must contain search words as this will only work if you have a direct search result in the name. For example if you sold blue widget's and your domain name was bluewidgets.co.uk then you would hit page one of the search engines for the term "blue widgets", however you would not necessarily hit the search engines for "widgets" or "red widgets". Your domain name should however be easy to remember and spell.

2. Website hosting. Your website will need to be hosted on a web server to enable it to be available on the world wide web. A number of ecommerce solutions will offer you hosting and software, these are good solutions as the company will generally be able to assist you much quicker if they manage the hosting too. All your files will be held on the web server and will not be directly accessed fro your personal computer or laptop.

3. Easy to navigate. Customers should be able to find the product they are looking for quickly, more often than not you will hear that you have 30 seconds to grab a customers attention before they begin to look else where. Customers eyes look along your website from left to right, meaning that a good categorised menu at the top left hand side of your website will enable them to get to the products they are looking for quickly.

4. Checkout system. Customers should also be able to make their purchase(checkout) easily, if they can't find a button easily to complete the purchase it will not matter how many customers you get to your site you will lose sales very quickly. Once they are in checkout the least number of pages that they have to navigate through the higher your conversion rates will be. We have seen 3 and 4 page checkouts used regularly, however statistics show that if you can find a single page checkout system for your online business then sales conversions increase to over 50%.

5. Online payments. Most customers like to use debit or credit cards to pay for their goods, if you cannot get credit card processing directly through your business account then you will need to use an online processor such as Paypal, Worldpay or Netbanx. Payment processors generally do not require you to provide a business plan or have a trading history however their charges will be a little higher than your High Street bank, additionally they will also relieve you of having to handle the customers card details. Whilst these are good solutions when starting a business you should aim to have direct card processing as soon as possible. Remember that when taking customers cards directly you will need additional security of an SSL certificate.

6. SSL security certificate. SSL(Secure Sockets Layer) or in leymans terms the little yellow padlock that appears in the browser to show that the page is secure. It is recommended to have an SSL certificate on your site because customers will feel more confident in making a purchase from your business. Even if you are using a payment processor as above you will be best advised to have your own SSL certificate on your site and advertise this.

Remember that your website will be your online face and that you cannot have sales people sat in front of online customers, so it is very important to consider all of the above when starting a business and getting online.

Copyright (c) 2008 Daren Burbridge