How To Add eCommerce to an Existing Website

If you are a retailer selling products, you may be thinking about selling your products online. We've personally seen brick and mortar stores sell over $25k per month in products online by implementing an eCommerce website.

You may be in a position where you already have a website and are wondering how you can capitalise on this opportunity. This article is for you. We will break down how you can start selling your products online and some things to consider before you get started.

New Website or Add to Existing?

In your research about eCommerce, you will probably come across platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and so on. These platforms require you to build and host your site on those platforms. This will mean a complete re-build of your website.

Building a New Website on an eCommerce Platform

Building a new website on an eCommerce platform like Shopify is probably the most common approach when it comes to using eCommerce. eCommerce platforms have key functionality built in, which makes it much easier and faster for you to get up and running.

Re-building your website on an eCommerce platform means you will get access to those key features. These include things such as:

• Being able to manage the products on your store
• Make bulk updates to products with things such as pricing and discounts
• Most importantly, take payments

eCommerce platforms like Shopify are easy to use and handle all the manual work for you.

Downsides of Rebuilding

A potential downside is that if you like your existing website design, then it may be hard to say goodbye to in favour of a new one. However, if you are really attached to it, you may be able to consult with a web developer who could potentially port that design over to the new eCommerce platform. There will be budgetary considerations in this approach depending on how complex your existing design is.

Often, it may be better to go for a completely new website refresh as web design patterns continue to update and change, so it will be a great experience for your users if you are using the latest best practices in web design.

Also, your existing website may not have been designed with eCommerce functionality in mind.

Key Considerations for User Experience:

• How easy is it for your customers to find things they are looking for?
• How smooth is the checkout experience?
• How fast does your website load?

Because eCommerce sites have a lot more content such as product photos, videos and PDFs, it is important to consider the performance of your website to give your customers the best experience.

Upsides of Rebuilding

The upside of implementing a new website on an eCommerce platform is that it will be less complex and therefore cheaper to opt for a new design. Often you will get a design that has already been pre-built, which means you just need to focus on getting your products looking great.

Adding eCommerce to an Existing Website

There are a number of reasons why you may want to keep your existing site and add eCommerce functionality to it.

Reasons to Keep Your Current Site:

• SEO Value: If your site has been around for a while, you may have lots of content such as blogs and other pages. Building a new site may affect all the good work that content has done to your Google rankings
• Design Investment: You may really like the design or have already invested significant amount of time and money into the current design
• Content Preservation: Maintaining your existing content structure and URLs

Depending on how your website is setup, you may be able to add eCommerce functionality to it. Websites that are built with WordPress, can easily adopt eCommerce through WooCommerce which natively integrates with WordPress websites via a plugin.

What is Involved in Planning eCommerce Adoption

There are many things to take into account when planning for adopting eCommerce:

Gathering Product Information

To upload your products to your eCommerce website, you will need to gather the necessary product information. You will need:

• Product names
• Product descriptions
• Product images, videos and any PDFs about product specifications
• Product warranties
• Sell price
• RRP (Recommended Retail Price)

From practical experience, we have found that there is usually missing information and in fact, preparing the product information takes the most time when creating an eCommerce site. Working with your manufacturer to understand what information they have available to you and what information you will need to manually get, will help you plan your new eCommerce site, and get a gauge of how long it might take.

In some cases, you may find the manufacturer is missing product images, some descriptions, product SKUs and other key pieces of information that will help your customer understand the products you are selling. In those cases, you will need to manually hunt for the information yourself, which can be time consuming.

Optimising Your Product Information for User Search

On top of gathering the product information, you may also need to edit your product name and descriptions to make them more user friendly when your customers are searching for them.

Example: You may have a manufacturer who provides the name of a wooden desk as "DXS-101-wooden". Your customer will not be searching like that to find a desk, so instead, you will need to rename it to "sturdy wooden study desk".

Choosing an eCommerce Platform

Once you have gathered all your product information, you will then need to choose which eCommerce platform to use. This will depend on whether you can build a new website from scratch or you will add eCommerce functionality to an existing website.

There are many eCommerce platforms to choose from, but typical platforms in the small to medium space are:

Each of these platforms have their own advantages and disadvantages, so you will need to review the product features to determine which one is best for you.

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Ready to start selling online? Contact firstSites for a free eCommerce consultation or explore our eCommerce development services.