Developing an eCommerce website is not an intricate process. You can concentrate on creating robust products and market your brand while turning to a software company to tackle the technical aspects, and you don’t even require an engineering degree. But, while you don’t need to be a developer yourself, you must understand the basics of what your website hosting provider renders in the context of eCommerce capabilities, and that part remains crucial even when your eCommerce operation is up and running.
According to Shopify’s engineering director, Stergios Anastasiadis, the essential tech living inside an eCommerce website is an internet connection. He added that any successful eCommerce platform must be able to run the tech on your website for you. So, to gain more insight in this domain, you can opt-out the best eCommerce courses available. This will help to make your progress.
Firstly, your merchant will help you ascertain the look and feel of your website. It will even render the capacity to save all your information and help you finalize and complete transactions. These are the most evident obligations of an eCommerce service provider. Above that, there’s a lot you must know about the particular tech your partner is using to make sure your website is successful, functional, and secure.
1. Website Security
You wish your eCommerce website to be secure from cybercriminals. The top websites offer 256-bit TLS – Transport Sockets Layer encryption, enabling for an end-to-end safe connection throughout all of the information and transactions on your website. Websites should match the TLS 1.2 standard and will require to upgrade a browser or OS if they support TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 at present. TLS has supplanted SSL – Secure Sockets Layer as the standard for communications protection over a network. All of the data is encrypted from the beginning of the website access to the end.
Moreover, eCommerce software must render you with a payment processing tool that can bring additional security during the cart and payment details of a transaction. A tool like Stripe tie in with eCommerce tools to render PCI SDD – Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards, without needing you to do any extra work on your end.
2. Website Performance
If your user finds your site to be too slow and your competitor’s too fast, you will most likely lose that client. Your webpages should ideally load in fewer than 100ms. And if not, your eCommerce merchant should be working on the back end to resolve the issue before you even notice.
Your eCommerce vendor will mostly have techies who are continually tracking page load times by utilizing a website monitoring tool to make sure your site is functioning at peak levels. If the webpages struggle due to some reason, then the employee is typically alerted automatically by phone or email that a problem has occurred.
3. Scale As Per Your Needs
Ecommerce services have different requirements as per the size and load of a store. You’ll want to rapidly and easily scale your website based on what happens to your load times as traffic on your page rises.
When your stock increases rapidly or require to support heavy load activities like seasonal deals and flash sales, you’ll need to scale your platform as per the needs or risks, users getting frustrated with your website’s performance and moving over to another store. Evaluate traffic and peak user load times to keep away from crashes and scale server resources accordingly.
4. Prioritize Smartphone over Desktop
Gone are those days when we used to do everything from computers. Today is the mobile era, and as a website builder, you must keep in mind how to create a user-friendly website on the mobile-first before moving on to the desktop. The content that functions on mobile will also deliver services just fine on desktop but not vice versa.
Anastasiadis said that with more users shopping on their smartphone than ever before, improving eCommerce websites for mobile is essential. The features that are created with a mobile first-interface can render vendors with more flexibility and scale from a technical viewpoint. If you’re planning to use any of the top eCommerce website builders today, this will not be a problem at all to you as most of these site builders already enhanced their mobile-friendly feature.
5. Cloud Hosting
Your service provider will most probably be saving your information in the cloud using giant tech providers like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. Discover which service you prefer by research like backup, security, uptime, and disaster recovery.
If you handle a service yourself, then Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all great options. Choosing one of these is essentially important as it will be responsible for how frequently your site goes down, whether your saved data is secure or not.
6. Website Updates
Your site must be handled efficiently even after its developed. You’ll require a vendor that can continually deliver new code to your site for better performance or new features. However, some merchants only provide new code once a day or a couple of days. You will want a vendor that can render code at any point in the day and never have to wait for issues to be resolved.
7. Data Engineering
Your eCommerce vendor must have a devoted data engineering team who can help you develop custom reports regarding your site’s performance. This report will help you ascertain if the products are correctly placed, if users are abandoning cart too often, or if you require a complete rethink about your website navigation.
Most vendors certainly offer out-of-the-box reporting, but if you don’t have a team available to create customized reports for you, you’ll need to work with a 3rd party to conduct this function when required. That will cost additional money and add undue hassle for you. The good news is that most businesses offer this service in one or another form; they’re continually updating the tools that cover the analytics.
8. Third-party Integrations
Even though you might be a tech newbie, you most likely use various software to run your business. The capability to connect all of your tools is essential for seamless workflows and improving data intelligence. For instance, if you run email marketing campaigns via MailChimp, then blending your marketing and eCommerce platforms ensure that promotional emails are tied directly back to the website. This enables greater supervision about which promotions worked, who bought what, whether you can retain the users who have abandoned the shopping cart or not.
Final Words
Hope this article helped you enough for what you must know before you develop your eCommerce website. It can be a bit challenging if you are a newbie, and depending on your needs, but these eight technical aspects should be handy in your eCommerce development journey.
Author Bio:
Harnil Oza is CEO of Hyperlink InfoSystem, a mobile app development company in USA and India, having a team of the best app developers who deliver the best mobile solutions mainly on Android and iOS platforms. He regularly contributes his knowledge on leading blogging sites like app development companies.
