Nowadays the World Wide Web represents not only the place used to store information and objective search instrument, but also plays a role of additional sales organization instrument. More and more companies places their websites in the Internet aiming to increase brand loyalty and popularize the business, get more new clients and partners. Internet regenerates and becomes one of the popular distribution channel of goods. In the 21st century, the era of technology and fast-growing markets, web site becomes instrument of vital importance for small trading company as well as for large one.



Let's reveal some evident advantages of e-store:

- minimal expenses (the cost for maintenance e-store, i.e. the costs of e-commerce hosting is smaller comparing with operating costs for maintaining physical store);

- you can keep the purchase history of each customer and send him notifications about fresh supplies that he is interested in;

- you get access to customers from all over the world;

In this article we will consider the methods of building effecting e-store and will answer questions as to how to choose e-commerce hosting for your on-line store.

In a nutshell, how can you build on-line store that will sell your products and what web hosting service to choose for this?

Before we proceed, we would like you to answer the following questions:

What will distinguish your e-store from the shops of your competitors?

How your potential customers used to buy products?

What is your pricing policy?

Is there any availability for customer to check his purchase history?

Will you e-store have products and price search option?

The next thing you should do is to choose e-commerce script that will build your on-line store and choose e-commerce service for it. At this pay attention to its future functionality, namely:

The e-store should be easy installable via installation wizard;

On-line store solution should e fully customizable (it est. you should have the option to change layout of e-store, to upload your company logo etc);

Will it be easy for you to import/export your e-commerce data and to manage your e-store via administration panel?

Consider the level of integration of payment gateways and SSL certificate to secure on-line transactions while ordering your products or services;

Is there any delivery options available?

After you determined the future functionality of your e-commerce we site you should consider the options of e-commerce web hosting services (both in terms of price, technical issues and web site uptime)

E-commerce hosting will define the reliability and stability of your on-line shop work, fast loading e-store is also very important as it is unlikely that the customer will wait for more that 30 seconds while your web site will finally load and will go to the web site of your rivals.

There is a wide range of fully functional preinstalled e-commerce scripts such as osCommerce, Zencart, Interchange, Agora. Availability to integrate nearly all available payment gateways, such as 2checkout, PayPal, e-check, on-line payment transactions via credit cards.

Perhaps, one of the main questions that will never loose its relevance is the security of on-line payment transactions. This is the factor that still prevents potential customer from purchasing goods on-line. That is why it is good to obtain and install dedicated SSL certificate or get for free shared SSL certificate from your web hosting provider.