Building a Successful E-Commerce Website

August 18th, 2010

At Digital Peabody, we’ve developed e-commerce websites for all sorts of different businesses, and we’re often asked what goes into a successful one. Though the answer has lots of different facets, at its most basic level, it boils down to two requirements: an idea and a platform with which you can realize that idea to its fullest potential.

Planning

The site planning phase will be different for every business. It depends on your business, your existing model and how e-commerce will fit in. When we built a site for Scribbles, a stationery and invitation shop in Denver, we recognized that the company already operated a successful physical store. Scribbles’ online storefront, then, needed to offer the full functionality of the store for their online storefront — specifically, product customization. So we built them a site that offers just that: nearly all of the stationery and invitations can be tailored to a customer’s needs. Custom font faces, ink colors, monograms and names are all at users’ fingertips on Scribbles’ site.

The extreme ski movie producers at Matchstick Productions, on the other hand, have a completely different model. Matchstick sells extreme skiing DVDs and ski merchandise worldwide, both through various vendors and directly through its website. For this site, we needed a whole different set of capabilities, so we integrated a state-of-the-art ExpressionEngine content management system to stream high-definition video and display photo galleries, among other things, in order to showcase their products and athletes.

Execution

Coming up with a great idea for a website is one thing, but it is meaningless if your web design company can’t fully execute it. At Digital Peabody, we specialize in the Magento e-commerce platform, which has the unprecedented flexibility you need in order to realize your web goals.

To begin with, Magento has every feature you would want and more — the average e-commerce site doesn’t need half of the functionality it offers. We’ll run through a more complete list of features in an upcoming article, but here are a few of the most popular ones:

offer coupons and gift cards
allow users to compare products and create wish lists
ability to ship to multiple addresses for one transaction
create product bundles
display related products
product personalization
much, much more

In addition to its out-of-the-box features, developers worldwide have created, and continue to create, every sort of extension imaginable to expand Magento’s functionality. Chances are, if you want a certain feature for your site, it either comes standard with Magento or there is a tested, proven extension that does exactly what you want. Magento is also easily integrated with other inventory and accounting systems through its highly flexible application programing interface (API). This means that our developers can seamlessly integrate Magento into whatever software you are already using to keep track of everything.

Another key benefit of Magento is its excellent SEO (search engine optimization) performance right out of the box due to its support for customizable URLs, an auto-generated site map, meta information for products and more. In an increasingly competitive e-commerce world, Magento’s SEO advantage makes it that much easier for potential customers to find your site — and potentially buy from you.

Digital P eabody can give you the expert help you need with both the planning and execution phases of building a successful e-commerce site. Our specialty, and our passion, is helping clients dream up their websites — and then making those dreams a reality.

Want to learn more about building an e-commerce site with Magento? Contact Digital Peabody at 303-468-5707, and take a look at our featured sites for more examples.