A successful e-commerce website is built on a carefully designed product catalog and great offerings. Here are some important questions to consider when creating an e-commerce website.

1. How many products will you be selling?

Begin by estimating the number of products you would like your online store to carry. This will help you get a sense of the scale of your e-commerce site.

Your product catalog/offering will influence a host of costs. These include:

• The cost of hosting your online store (the more products you offer, the more it costs).
• The cost of your e-commerce site development will certainly impact how long it will take to develop the store. The more products, the more content to create and upload onto the store.

2. What are your product attributes?

You need to know your product’s features/attributes by understanding how many different sizes, colors, and patterns of your products are available and how to organize them on the website.

A product variant is a mix of one or more permutations. A green shoe in size L, for example, is one option. Another option is a blue shoe in size L.

Each variant should have its own name, price, quantity in stock, shipping dimensions, and weight. Other variations of the same product may have different images and description content.

So your shoe products may come in 10 sizes and 10 colors. That means your store will have100 different variants of just that shoe.

3. How many product categories does your website have?

The way you organize your catalog will have a significant impact on how your e-commerce website is built and how successfully it converts visitors into buyers.

Products are usually organized into groups or categories, such as Shoes, Shirts, Trousers, and Shorts. These categories can be broken down into subcategories. For example, shirts might have business shirts and casual shirts subcategories and can be further broken down into subcategories e.g long-sleeved and short-sleeved shirts.

A good e-commerce platform will support multiple categories though it is ideal to have two or maybe three subcategories. This ensures a smooth user experience and navigation for your customers.

4. Monitor stock levels

By keeping track of stock levels, you can set up your e-commerce store such that you won’t run out of items.

You can let customers request email notifications when a product is back in stock or you might want to let customers know when the stock of an item is low.

Determine whether maintaining stock records on your e-commerce website is necessary. You might typically be able to receive stock from a supplier in 2 to 3 days. If a consumer orders an item that had just recently run out of stock when they placed their purchase, you might simply notify them of this and give them a discount.

5. Create and upload product catalog information

It takes a lot of work to create and load product information. Most businesses overestimate the time required. In actuality, it is the fundamental reason why new e-commerce websites launch late.

The following information is required as a bare minimum:

• Product name
• Product description
• Price
• Product description
• High-quality/fidelity images of a reasonable size (we suggest at least 600px wide images).
• Variety/variation e.g. size and color of the products you’ll be offering

6. Your Product Page Design

The majority of e-commerce websites display product pages in a pretty standardized manner.

The website design approach will usually include the following:

• Product name
• Product Description
• One or more product images
• Price
• Product variations
• Shopping Cart

Conclusion

There are many key factors you need to consider as you plan to build your e-commerce website. Understanding the following helps and the implementation process will move more smoothly.

Contact us today, to get started with your e-commerce website design.