Online store design

By: Harish Steve
Submitted: 2008-07-18 16:50:50
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If you are the owner of a successful, traditional brick and mortar business, then you should consider setting up an online store too. Online sales channels give your business tremendous benefit. A study conducted by Jupiter Search estimates that more than two-thirds of the business conducted by offline transactions are influenced by online experience. More than 45% of consumers search for a product in the retailer’s website and then use the same retailer for buying the product. Still wondering if you should go online with your business?

However, you need more than an established reputation to succeed online. A professional online store design is the first thing you need. With the advancements in internet technology, it is possible for even small businesses to compete with large competitors through web stores that look classy and sell internationally.

A winning online store design duplicates traditional brick and mortar shops as closely as possible. They allow consumers to browse through existing products, select those products they find attractive and finally buy only the products they like. Added features like comments and recommendations left by previous buyers and current users, and related, helpful items purchased by other buyers make it easy for consumers to buy.

One of the most powerful characteristics of an excellent online store design is its strict adherence to SEO marketing rules. The logic behind this is simple. When people need something, they use a powerful search engine like Google or Msn to search for the product. That is why it is important to let search engines understand what products you sell. Search engines rate and rank your websites when users search for keywords related to your product. Search engines pick up these keywords from different sections in your page. SEO friendly online stores automatically place all important keywords related to your products within the Title tags, Meta tags and ALT tags in the web pages. This helps search engines crawl through your product pages and pick up your products and services. By adhering properly to web design principles, your product pages get indexed properly and listed by major search engines.

Many excellent online store designs also help you tap into the market by allowing you to offer various helpful extras that have been designed with the marketer in mind. Real-time shipping quotes from various sources, the ability to set custom shipping quotes, a plethora of payment gateways, watertight security, inventory control, product update and newsletter marketing and web analytics are some examples. Feature rich online store designs are a web marketer’s ultimate marketing tool. This makes it possible for new users to set up their store in a matter of minutes while advanced users can make use of a number of advanced features that make their web store versatile, flexible and completely scalable.

Intuitive store designs help you drive traffic to your business, merchandise your products, manage your clients and much more. In short, you should select a store design that provides you with a complete customized solution to successfully run your online business.

Article source: Expert Articles