The world is moving towards digital solutions faster than ever before, more evident since the pandemic started. This shift to digital solutions has affected brick and mortar business ventures as they can no longer attract as many customers to their stores as they used to in the past.
Today, we will talk about the features that are a must-have for any eCommerce website, followed by the development process of an eCommerce website and the range of prices that one can expect to pay when they hire the best website design company.
Before we go on, it is essential to consider that there is no better time to invest in eCommerce than right now.
Vital statistics related to eCommerce in 2021:
- Close to 2 billion people have purchased products and services online in the last 12 months
- Global eCommerce sales have surged close to 30% in the past 12 months
- Business to business eCommerce sales are at an all-time high with 18% annual growth
- Millions of offline shoppers have decided to switch to online shopping since the pandemic started
The essential features for any eCommerce website
A payment gateway:
While there are many important aspects of eCommerce when you look for a web development company in Dubai, the payment gateway is the essential core element of eCommerce. Choosing the best way to approach this depends on several factors that the eCommerce website development company you choose should discuss with you before the process begins.
Optimized security:
Security will always be a relevant subject when it comes to eCommerce. Securing your eCommerce platform is essential because monetary transactions are always the target of hackers and cybercriminals who want to intercept those payments. All websites that use eCommerce must be protected with SSL certificates.
An integrated blog:
When you are dealing with the best website design company for this purpose, they will tell you just how important it is to ensure that content marketing is a big part of your eCommerce efforts. You must always consider this as a must for your website. Ensuring that you can publish quality content as often as possible is the best way to grow organically.
Search engine optimized layout:
When you are looking to deploy an eCommerce website, you need to ensure that the code and the layout are optimized to get the best SEO results. Having an SEO-optimized platform will be just as relevant as creating new content as often as possible by blogging that would boost your marketing efforts. ~
A content management system:
Most business owners are not technical enough to understand how a website should be updated or managed. They surely wouldn’t know how to code or change the platform’s content on the code level. This is why any eCommerce website needs a reliable and intuitive content management system.
While these statistics are only rough estimates in most cases, they tell a very compelling story regarding what we can expect with eCommerce in the coming decade. The process of ensuring that your business can sell products online is crucial if you want to be able to reach your audience.
The development process for an eCommerce website
Drafting a detailed Scope of Work (SOW):
Preparing a detailed SOW is the first step to start with an eCommerce project. Any web development company in Dubai will take the time to draft a proper SOW detailing your project’s complete scope and functionality. Having such a document will help you identify potential gaps in your business idea at a very early stage and thus save a lot of time and cost that you might incur later.
Wireframing:
Wireframing is another essential part of the website development process as it forms the base on which the website designs would be built. The wireframes provide a skeletal view of the various pages in your platform, which helps you identify how a user would navigate through your eCommerce platform. Hence, it is necessary to verify and approve the wireframes before graphic design begins.
UI/UX design:
This is going to be the part when you come up with the user experience aspect of the website’s design. A good development team always takes the design process seriously. They will provide the required mock-ups to ensure an optimal outcome after approval.
Web Development:
While everything we have mentioned earlier is part of the web development process, web development company in itself is creating the entire structure of the website, not just the eCommerce store section.
Continuous testing and bug fixing:
Once the entire process is finished, this gives way to the testing and bug report stage of the development process. This will be very important, and it will allow the development team to create updates and patches that fix any issues with the content.
A free warranty period of 3 months:
When most of the competition provides only 1-month warranties, we are always happy to go the distance and give people a whole trimester of full warranty for the work we provide.
The costs of eCommerce development
There are too many factors to consider to come up with an estimate on the costs of eCommerce web design. With that said, it is possible to give you a very rough estimation of these costs for a basic structure that contains the essential features we mentioned earlier.
The costs of eCommerce development can range between $4,000 to $15,000 for a basic eCommerce website with a Content Management System (CMS). You can reach out to our team to help you with a custom offer for your business idea.
We also offer a free 3 month warranty period for the apps and websites we deliver. This means that once your eCommerce website is up and running, we will handle all updates and required bug fixes to ensure the best results with your eCommerce business.
What is your main strategy?
There are going to be many different approaches to how you plan on promoting your eCommerce business. Some owners will go for the organic route and they will invest in creating reliable content that they can rank on Google and other major search engines. The biggest issue with this approach is that it takes months for the results to start showing, but once you gain momentum, this is going to be the best strategy for long-term success.
On the other hand, you have those who prefer the idea of investing in the paid advertisement from day one. The advantage of this strategy is that you could start seeing results almost instantly. The biggest disadvantage is that you would be paying for advertisement on a constant basis which could turn out to be expensive in the long run.
The best way to handle this is to balance things out with both of these strategies. You could start by giving your eCommerce business a quick initial boost with paid advertisement, while you allow organic growth to happen by posting quality content on a constant basis
Hiring a professional service is essential
When you are working on any kind of e-commerce process, you will find that the best way to achieve great results is to look for a professional service. Some people search for web development company Dubai and they find great options for this purpose.
Generally speaking, the use of e-commerce website development company solutions is always going to be extremely important. The last thing you want is to try things on your own as this would be in effect and most importantly would cost you time and can turn out to be counterproductive if you do not have the experience needed to perform these tasks efficiently.
This is the reason why we strongly recommend that you always consider the value of investing in a professional service that is going to help you reap faster results for your business. This is going to save you a large amount of time that would otherwise be spent in trial and error.