Everything You Need To Build Your eCommerce Website

Everything You Need To Build Your eCommerce Website

This article is a quick guide on everything you need to build your eCommerce website.

Everything You Need To Build Your eCommerce Website

The idea of this article is to help you with a clear image of what is needed, and what you should pay attention to.

You will find lots of tips and recommendations on things like:

– Choosing between a website builder or CMS like WordPress.

– Do you actually need a website if you do FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)?

– What pages are absolutely mandatory on your eCommerce website.

– Fonts that work great on online stores.

– The safest color combination which also looks great.

– Logo.

– Business name and website name.

– Payment options.

– Contact.

Let’s start with the first thing.

Choosing between a website builder or CMS like WordPress

Both website builders and WordPress are great for eCommerce.

While website builders are highly simple to use for starting your online store, WordPress might seem harder to customize.

But this is not actually true, and if you really can’t do it by yourself, you can easily find a WordPress professional to hire.

If I were you, I would pick WordPress as it has also lots of good things:

– the blogging features

– it is free to use (website builders will cost you money each month)

– simple to customize as you want

– tons of support from the world-wide community

– lots of free and paid gorgeous templates

– support

– low prices for customizations and added features

Do you actually need a website if you do FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)?

If you are into FBA and you don’t know for sure if you need a website as you will actually sell your products on Amazon, here is my thought on this.

Yes, you can have an FBA business without having your own website.

But you need this website to create a brand for your products, to offer support, to get extra sales, and to reach much higher annual revenues.

Think well about it.

The cost to have your own online store is small and the potential return of the investment is extremely high.

What pages and features are absolutely mandatory on your eCommerce website.

Here is what I consider absolutely mandatory in terms of pages and features for your online store.

Web pages

Homepage 

Blog

Category Overview

Product Page 

Search and Listing Results 

Login/Create Account

Mini Cart

Cart Page 

Guest Checkout 

Shipping & Returns

Payment information

Checkout Review 

Order Confirmation

Orders/Order History

Profile/Account Settings 

Payment Settings

Help

Terms and Conditions

Privacy Policy 

Company details

GDPR policy

Contact Us

Features

Search

Mini cart

Full cart

Guest checkout

Sign up to email newsletter and WhatsApp news

Quick chat

Shipping cost calculator

WhatsApp contact

Fonts that work great on online stores.

When choosing the right font for your online store, there are 2 aspects that you should pay attention for.

First is the legibility of the font – you absolutely want a font that is easy to read by your audience. If you sell glasses for senior people, you might want to use a larger, easier-to-read font.

The second thing is that you want your font to be connected with the products you sell.

Do you sell premium and expensive products? Then you want to use a font that works with your products.

Imagine that you use a colorful and joyful font for selling Rolls Royce cars.

It is clear that this won’t work well.

If you want to not overcomplicate font selection for your store and stay safe, pick one of these fonts:

Lato
Oswald
Merriweather
Playfair Display
The safest color combination which also looks great.

The safest approach to color combinations for your eCommerce website is to stick with black and white.

This is the best color scheme because it is practical, professional, and versatile.

Have in mind that even if you use the black and white color scheme, your products might ce super colorful and this way your website will not become a rainbow.

This bland and white scheme works great no matter what you sell.

Logo

Your eCommerce website will need a logo.

What I highly recommend you is to use a logo design contest for getting your logo.

For a $100 prize you will have many designers compete for your logo design.

And you will get a nice and unique logo, with copyright and everything you need, for a small price, and made by a real logo designer, not by a computer.

Business name and website name.

Your website name will be your business name.

But your company can actually have any name.

When choosing your website name, you want to pay super attention for the following things:

– You should get a .com domain, even if you sell locally.

Why? Because you want to be sure that your website name is available as a .com domain and you want to block anybody else from getting the most important domain for your business.

– You want a unique website name.

Pick a name that is not similar with an already established business.

– What does your website name mean.

Check what your website name means. In English it might be ok, but in another language might be translated in ways that you don’t want.

– After you find the right business name and it is available as a .com domain, check it on Facebook, TikTok, Linkedin, and Instagram.

You want your business name to be available also on the most common social media platforms.

– Copyright

Look on the internet and see if there are any potential issues with the website name / business name you are about to choose.

You really don’t want to get into Copyright issues.

Payment options

Implement as many payment options as possible.

You want at minimum to have the following payment options:

– Credit card

– PayPal

But you should also add Bitcoin, this is the feature and you want to be part of it.

Contact

You want your customers and potential customers to easily contact you.

Have contact forms, WhatsApp, phone numbers, and your email public so your customers and get in touch with you.

I absolutely hate when I can’t find good and quick ways to contact an online store.

And this is not just me, but all the others hate it too.

Conclusions

eCommerce websites are not a simple or easy business.

If you want to make it work very well (crazy annual revenue), you have to pay attention to everything.

And this article is part of your research.

Alexandru Cuibari, whatfontis.com founder
 | Website |  + posts

I'm a programmer at heart. But in my 20s, I realized there was more to the world of fonts than just Courier.
Driven by endless curiosity, I built a system to explore them.

That project grew into one of the world’s leading font identifier platforms: www.WhatFontIs.com.
By 2024, WhatFontIs is helping nearly one million designers—famous or not—discover the names of the fonts they need.