Location, Location, Location
August 31, 2006
What do wildly successful ecommerce sites and pricey real estate have in common? Location, location, location. The best designed website in the world won’t benefit your business if it is hosted in the wrong place by a mediocre company. Choosing the right web host for your ecommerce site is critical to the success of your business.
Selecting the best host for your site requires a certain amount of research. Issues such as space, traffic, domains, servers and databases are important to consider before choosing a hosting package. The first thing you should do is determine exactly what your ecommerce enterprise will require and then match your hosting package to those needs. Be thorough and take nothing for granted when choosing your provider and plan.
Typical considerations include email, file transfer capabilities, amount of memory, customer service, and types of financial transactions that are offered. Some hosting packages include a certain number of POP email accounts as well as the ability to have web mail. Many companies need to be able to check their email accounts anywhere in the world, so access to a web interface that allows employees to view email from a remote location is critical.
Ecommerce sites that deal in electronic sales such as ebooks or streaming videos need hosting packages that will accommodate the huge memory that is needed to house the files. Sufficient bandwidth is critical for speedy file transfers. Hosting packages generally offer upgrades for bandwidth and storage space if the initial account is not large enough.
Ecommerce hosting services generally cost more than other types of hosting options, but they also offer a long list of features that are crucial to ecommerce success. The best ecommerce hosts offer an abundance of customer support both to your company and to the visitors to your site. Some providers issue software or assist you in creating online catalogs of your products and services.
Companies who specialize in ecommerce hosting will support merchant accounts, which allow users of the web site to buy items using credit cards. With the ever-growing nightmares associated with credit card fraud and other types of identification theft, customers are understandably leery of making purchases on the internet. Be sure that the hosting service you select provides Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates or “digital certificates.” An SSL certificate provides encrypted communication between the client and the server, when transmitting their personal information and credit card numbers. The encryption “key” is virtually impossible to break, making the communications between the client and the server very safe. Most customers are unwilling to do business with sites that don’t feature SSL.
“Icing on the cake” features like an easy to use control panel, access to server logs and availability of software, scripts and access options differentiate the great web hosts from the “so-so” web hosts. Many web hosting companies offer an extensive library of eye-catching templates and the ability to create messages with your own themes and styles.
At a minimum the ecommerce host you are considering should have the following features:
- Merchant account solutions
- Credit card processing and payment gateway services
- Virtual terminal key for mail order and phone sales
- Retail and auction capabilities
- Integration of various shopping carts and software systems
- Online reporting
- Twenty four hour customer support
The Personal Touch
One of the most relaxing things about shopping at your neighborhood market is that the owner knows who you are and the things you are most interested in buying. With some e-commerce packages, you can offer a similar “personal touch” to your online customers. By tracking your customers’ former visits to your site, the items they viewed and purchased and customer ID information you can welcome them by name to your site and offer customized suggestions on items they might like to purchase. When it’s time to check out, your regular customers’ information will be easily accessed and can be automatically filled in for them.
What Are The Steps?
The ecommerce hosting solution you select determines the impact of your website and the possible response from customers. The basic steps in choosing an ecommerce hosting solution include:
- Evaluate and compare ecommerce hosting service providers
- Find out about their technical support
- Check out the security, space, speed, uptime and email services covered by the hosting provider.
- Check to see if they have value-added features like an easy to maneuver control panel, software availability, access and scripts options, such as FTP access for file sharing.
- Make sure the host offers secure service and encryption features.
Learn as much as you can about your host’s shopping cart. Make sure it supports SSL. It will also need to support your merchant account and payment gateway. Find out if the cart recommended has a maximum product limit, and of course try not to exceed it. The store may slow down and perform poorly if there are too many products in it.
As your ecommerce business grows, your business model changes. Things can happen very quickly in the world of ecommerce and you want to be positioned to respond in the blink of an eye. Make sure the host you choose is equipped and ready to grow your business. Online or offline, time is money.
Copyright 2006 © Website Source, Inc.
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