This post is dedicated to all e-commerce project owners.

There is a lot of ways to make huge and even crucial mistakes building your own e-commerce project or service. Most likely you can make wrong decisions choosing your project or service website platform which will be not suitable for your bank merchant, product range, website flexibility.

You can get to the question „why should I choose platform by merchant accounts and products?“. Ok the answer could be tricky. Firstly if you make analysis (maybe it is right to use – what products will be mostly sold of your product range) of your products and / or services you will need tell to yourself what platform will suites products regarding what type their are (e.g. Magento Ecommerce, Joomla, etc. – by the way you can install Magento Ecommerce, Joomla, etc. with one click option in Host1Plus.com), but you must think and about other important things, like security... Security is the most important after your product management and visibility.

What concerns security open-source programs are not the safest solution at all. Why? In our opinion open-source is OPEN that means that if someone works with open-source software developing it they know what is the weakest sides of that software. Therefore sooner or later all those weakest sides will appear on the net.
In this case your website can be hacked and harmed with for example loss of client details, credit card numbers, etc.
What would be the solutions?

1. Make full overview of what you are selling and in what audience you will be targeting.

2. Choose merchant account which can offer 3D security verification for your transactions and QUICK SUPPORT SERVICE. (By the way we had some issues regarding merchant account which was responding in about 48 hours which is absolutely mad!).
Quick announcement if you are a bit confused: We can help you with any type of merchant accounts, even with high risk ones as Host1Plus became a partner with Commerzbank one of the biggest bank in Germany.

3. Don‘t be blind thinking that open-source software for your shop will be good enough. You always can find some inexpensive shop solutions where they can be customized by their developers by your demands. (Don‘t get me wrong open-source software like Magento or so on are really powerfull and can be really greatly implemented, but then again security issues...)

4. Have your own usability expert which will be from start to the end getting your website usability sorted (If you need we can help you in usability, just give us a shout we will give you some advices FOR FREE!).

5. Consider where you host your website and to what audience your hosting company is orientated. This is the last point, but also very important. Therefore there is a lot of posts how to choose the hosting company etc. The only few things we can add as a hosting company: Be sure (really sure) that service is provided with 24/7 support and that hosting company understand about e-commerce, but not only with programming or technical things.

You are always welcome to ask us about anything what regards e-commerce or similar things. To contact us simple go to host1plus. com and press chat button to chat with us. We can find solutions for your e-commerce projects starting from project architecture to little web design bit.

Hey guys maybe you have something to add about our post?
Thank you,
Host1Plus. com

 

Usability is actually something that's underrated. If possible, you should sit down with somebody and go though the whole process with them. This allows to see things from an outsider/consumer point of view, and make you realise things that can be improved with your ecommerce website.

Things like:

drop-down menus covering the search bar or other critical elements

the search function returning no results or no useful results, even though your store carries the product

not having the search bar at all, and the user doesn't know where to go

not having a complete list of links in your navigation

not having consistency throughout your site, for e.g. naming your catalogue "store" in some instances, and "shop" in other instances.

 

Here is a recent article I wrote on Top 10 inexpensive ways to test & improve site usability.

Hope it is helpful.