What to Expect When Using eCommerce Website Builders
When it comes to earning money one of the sectors that has seen the steadiest increase in numbers is eCommerce. From a value of around $1.3 trillion in 2014 the market steadily expanded to a global figure of $.23 billion in 2017. It is expected to reach a mind-boggling $4.8 billion in 2121.
An explosion in technological advances covering everything from mobile to Internet of Things (IoT) is fuelling the expansion in a number of eCommerce sites aside from the traditional giants. Small eCommerce sites are increasing in number and sell everything from staples to niche products such as custom-designed furry hats (by spirithoods.com)
Yet owning in eCommerce site is more than simply marketing and more than just standard web hosting. It requires knowledge of both in order to survive in what has become an increasingly competitive environment.
If you have something you want to sell and are being overwhelmed by the magnitude of things involved, don’t worry, we have some answers for you. A large part of your online business will rely on your web host and as the future owners of an eCommerce store, you need to know what to expect in the making of it.
Thanks to the deluge of popular and easy-to-use website builders, almost anyone can create an eCommerce store today without significant traditional overheads such as outsourcing design, dealing with payments platforms and other technical issues.
What to Look Out for in eCommerce Site Builders
You’ve seen lots of web stores around and have no technical or design skills. This may be worrying you as you have no idea how you are going to build a great looking eCommerce store of your own. Fret not – let’s talk about themes.
The Basic Design
Themes are pre-built templates that website builders often have ready for their customers (that’s you). They put together basic layouts which are beautiful and functional – all you need to do is customize a chosen template for your business.
Great site builder hosts often have many templates which you can choose from. Take Wix for example, which is one of the best ecommerce online store builders today. It has over 500 awesome templates that you can customize for your own needs. These are templates which fit the requirements of almost any modern site – form the coding they are done in to the technology they use.
Design problems – taken care of.
Customizing Your Site
Website builders revolve around the concept of powerful visual editors. Using one of these to edit your website can be as simple as getting used to a drag-and-drop interface. Working with this system, customizing your chosen template should be a breeze.
Changing images for example might be as easy as selecting an existing image on your site and then choosing to replace it with something else you prefer. Click, select an option and upload – you’re done.
Thanks to these simple mechanisms, anyone can put together a beautiful site with zero coding knowledge. Or if you want to, you can add in snippets of code as well, it’s all up to you.
Mobile Platforms
One thing to take note of when running an online store is that an increasing number of people are shopping online using their mobile devices. A whopping 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device over a 6-month period in 2018.
Thankfully, most of the top-tier eCommerce site builder know this and their templates are mobile-friendly. We have seen variations of this, such as the standard use of responsive templates all the way to dedicate mobile editor that Weebly has.
Powerful Features
Adding on extra features to an eCommerce site usually isn’t the main responsibility of the visual editor. That is meant to help you manage the design aspect of your site. Most good website builders also come with additional applications or plugins which you can simply choose to add to and activate for use on your site.
These apps or plugins can potentially make your site very powerful. For example, you might choose to use a plugin that helps you manage inventory for your site. When an item is sold, the plugin reduces your inventory and when that runs low it notifies you that it’s time to re-stock.
That is just one small way in which these plugins can empower your online store.
Managing Payments
Because of the sensitive issues where payments and methods are concerned, most individuals can’t easily manage payment providers. With eCommerce site builders, that is usually taken care of for you.
For a small fee that usually is a tiny percentage of each transaction, you can sell things online and never even have to talk to a payments provider. Weebly for example starts their plans with a transaction fee of 3% and allows you to sell up to 25 products.
Different website builder hosts have variations on how they take their cut, so shop around for a bit until you find one that you are willing to live with.
Security
Because they often deal with payments for their customers, site builders take on the responsibility of security in that sense. What’s left is the basics like you ensuring the safety of your website visitors with an SSL connection by switching to HTTPS. This too will be provided for with many site builder hosts.
Conclusion: Good Site Builder Host, No Problems
As you can see, the entire process of building and managing your eCommerce site doesn’t have to be as painful as you might think. Sure, you’ll need to manage the business aspect of everything, but that is something you would need to do even for a traditional retail business.
Use a site builder to do your work for you and experience how quick and easy it can be. The monthly fees involved are a lot less than you might think and it is often the case that you can upscale the plan you’re on as your business grows. It’s truly a win – win situation!
