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Read MoreBuilding your own eCommerce website is an exciting step toward growing your business. This guide will walk you through each stage of the process—from planning and designing your website to adding products, configuring payments, and launching your store. Whether you're starting fresh or enhancing an existing site, our comprehensive guide will provide the insights and tools you need to create a high-performing, well-optimized eCommerce website that drives sales and growth.
While there are already many popular eCommerce platforms in the market such as Amazon and eBay that provides quick and easy access to reach customers, building your own eCommerce website still have advantages that these third-party platforms can't match.
With your own eCommerce website, you have complete control over the look and feel of your brand. You can customize your site's design, product & brand pages, and checkout process, offering a unique and consistent experience that aligns with your brand values. This control helps build stronger relationships with customers and reenforce brand loyalty.
Selling on your own eCommerce website allows you to collect and analyze customer data directly, offering insights into shopping behaviors and preferences. Deeply understanding your customers' journey and their characteristics helps you optimize website and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Owning an eCommerce website puts you in control of your SEO strategy and marketing campaigns. It allows you to optimize the website SEO settings and content for search engines, driving organic traffic directly to your online store. You can also implement tailored marketing strategies such as email marketing campaigns and SEM (search engine marketing) to promote your products and scale your brand exposure.
Unlike Amazon or eBay, where high access fees, transaction costs, product catalogue limitations, and restrictions occur, having your own eCommerce website can maximize the flexibility of avoiding these high costs and restrictions. It provides a more predictable and manageable expense structure, saving money and giving you the freedom to scale your business at your own pace.
One major advantage of owning your own eCommerce website is the ability to integrate directly with accounting software like Xero,
QuickBooks, or MYOB. These integrations often automatically sync sales data and invoices, helping you keep your business finances on track
with minimal effort.
The first step in building a successful eCommerce site is proper planning. This includes defining your industry, target market, and products or services, as well as selecting the right domain name. All these factors are important for developing the website.
Still not sure where to start? Book a free consultation with Oncord to discuss your needs in detail. Our web professionals will guide you through your specific situation and provide a personalized online solution that works best for your business.
When building an eCommerce website, using a content management system (CMS) is often the most efficient choice compared to self-hosting, which requires numerous technical work and ongoing maintenance. Most CMS platforms are cloud-based, offering built-in web hosting and simplifying the process of setting up and managing your site.
When selecting the right CMS platform, consider the following factors:
Why Oncord? Our drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create a professional eCommerce site without coding. Enjoy fast, secure hosting with SSL, seamless integrations (no plugins), and reliable performance.
Our flexible, no-lock-in plans come with no transaction fees and unlimited products, ensuring you stay in control of your costs.
Plus, 92% of support inquiries are resolved within 24 hours, and we’re rated 5 stars on Capterra, G2, and Xero.
When building your website on your own, there are three key aspects to consider:
If you use Oncord to build your website, our AI Design Generator can create a range of template variants based on your logo, making the design process effortless. With our intuitive drag-and-drop page editor, you can easily create and customize your website without any coding. Additionally, our powerful SEO settings ensure your site is optimized for search engines from the start.
Having trouble building your website? Oncord provides website services to guide you through the process. Book a free consultation, and our team will help create a solution tailored to your needs. We also work with highly rated web agencies that can assist in building, managing, and growing your online presence. Explore our trusted partners.
Are you a developer or agency? Oncord’s Partner Program offers
valuable resources to help you deliver the best results for your clients.
Oncord is a standout platform with a simple UX that both developers and clients love. Fast, reliable sites and excellent support make it hard to beat. We love Oncord!
Once your website design and pages are complete, it's time to add your products. This step is essential for delivering a smooth shopping experience and ensuring customers can easily find and understand what you're offering. The followings are some of the key elements when adding your products.
Your product titles and descriptions play an important role in engaging customers. The title should be clear and concise, giving customers a quick understanding of what the product is. Focus on straightforward language that helps customers immediately identify the item.
For descriptions, provide detailed information about the product’s features and benefits. Aim to write descriptions that are easy to read and helpful, using bullet points or short paragraphs to break up the text. Well-written descriptions can improve the user experience and help drive purchasing decisions.
High-quality images are essential for showcasing your products and improving the overall customer experience. Clear photos help potential buyers feel confident about their purchases. However, it's important to balance image quality with file size—large images can slow down your website, which can lead to a poor user experience.
To avoid this, optimize your images for the web by compressing them to reduce file size while maintaining visual quality. For more detailed tips, you can refer to our guide on optimizing images for the web.
Optimizing the SEO settings for your product descriptions can increase their visibility in search engine results. Your SEO description (meta description) should be a brief, compelling summary of the product, highlighting key features and encouraging users to click through to learn more. Keep it concise—ideally within 320 characters—and focus on communicating the product's benefits clearly.
A well-organized product catalogue makes it easier for customers to find what they’re looking for. Group products into logical categories
and brands. This structure helps create a seamless browsing experience, reducing frustration and making it easier for customers to compare
similar products.
Oncord’s powerful product editor allows you to fully customize product details and SEO settings, giving you complete control over how your
products are presented and found online. You can also easily structure your product catalog by categories or brand, creating a seamless
shopping experience for your customers. You can even upload a file to import product data, streamlining the process
and saving valuable time.
Once your products are ready to sell, the next step is configuring how customers will pay and receive their orders. Offering multiple payment options and setting up reliable shipping methods are essential to delivering a smooth shopping experience.
Your website should support a range of payment options to cater to different customer preferences. These include traditional methods like credit or debit cards, as well as popular digital payment services such as PayPal or Afterpay. To process credit card payments, you'll need to configure a secure payment gateway, ensuring transactions are handled safely and efficiently.
Oncord provides multiple payment options, from credit cards to popular digital payment services. We support a wide range of payment gateways, allowing you to choose the most secure and cost-effective option for your business, giving both you and your customers peace of mind.
Having a clear and transparent shipping policy is just as important. Decide whether you’ll offer local pickup, whether you can deliver to PO boxes, and other important details. Your eCommerce platform should also integrate with popular shipping carriers to provide accurate shipping calculations at checkout, helping to streamline the process and ensure customer satisfaction.
Oncord empowers you to configure multiple shipping methods, from standard delivery to local pickup. We integrate with popular shipping carriers' APIs, saving you time while ensuring accurate shipping calculations for a smooth and seamless checkout process.
Before launching your eCommerce site, thorough testing is essential to ensure everything runs smoothly for your customers. A well-tested website can prevent issues that might negatively impact user experience or sales.
Oncord makes testing easy, allowing you to quickly toggle pages online or offline for seamless previews. Our powerful link
checker helps you identify and fix any broken links across your website in seconds, ensuring everything works perfectly before going
live.
Once you've thoroughly tested your website and are satisfied with its design and functionality, it’s time to go live. The process typically involves parking your domain on the website platform and may require a few technical configurations, such as DNS settings.
Oncord’s Go Live Wizard walks you through each step to ensure a smooth launch. Our Domain Health Checker also helps verify that every aspect of your domain is properly configured, resolving any technical issues to ensure your site is fully optimized and error-free.
After launching your website, it's important to monitor its performance and collect data to better understand your customers. Analyzing this data offers valuable insights, helping you make informed decisions and optimize your site. You should also track how your pages rank on search engine results (SERPs) to seek opportunities for improving visibility and driving traffic.
Oncord’s analytics tool provides detailed data on a visual dashboard, allowing you to track key metrics such as page views, bounce rate, top landing pages, referrers, and visitors’ countries, devices, etc. This helps you understand your site’s performance and identify areas for improvement.
Oncord’s customer activity feed also helps you follow your customers’ journeys on your site, from the pages they visit to
which channels brought them in, and whether they received and interacted with your marketing emails or clicked on ads.
To use third-party tools, you’ll usually need to install tracking tags on your website to allow these tools to collect data. Oncord provides a comprehensive guide for setting up popular third-party tools such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, ensuring you have everything you need to effectively monitor and optimize your website.
Now that your eCommerce site is live, it's time to drive traffic and attract customers. Promotion usually involves two key strategies: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).
Creating a successful eCommerce website requires careful planning, strong execution, and continuous monitoring. By following this guide, you’ll have all the steps in place to build, launch, and grow your online store efficiently. Whether you're creating an eCommerce website from scratch or enhancing an existing site, Oncord offers the tools and support to help you succeed.
Ready to create your eCommerce website? Get started with Oncord today!
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Discover how DNS records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC enhance email security and deliverability, plus practical tools to verify your setup.
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