As E-commerce store is a website as well, so many things in their development are similar. Except few, that will be described below. You will see the differences.

E-commerce website has to be user-friendly, meaning it has to be with convenient and fast navigation. Also you want your website to be pretty informative yet non-distractive without pilling-up it with undesired information. Be sure that your website is fast-loading, most of users do not like to wait more than 3-4 seconds until it loaded and so you have to be careful with flash elements, pictures and other heavy content. One more thing – don’t even try to make your E-commerce website with music on the Home page or you will definitely lose a good portion of potential purchasers!

All above mentioned is about first impression and you will not have another chance. If user will face with bad experience using your e-store you will, he will click Back button and will forget your website forever! So be passionate and spend a little time to plan and develop such website to keep users as long as it possible on it. Then you will supposedly have more purchases, more revenue and good impression for further advance. So let’s get down to the specifics.

E-commerce site design.
All successful e-commerce websites have similar things: efficient yet simple design, light perception and neat navigation. So be sure to select proper website design company that provides design of e-commerce stores service. Look though their portfolio and make sure that have experience in creating such websites.

And while your website design is in progress, here are some things to consider:
- The main object that should grab user’s attention on your website.
- Simplicity of feedback i.e. contacts form, e-mails.
- Reviews of users. If new visitors will see them on your website they will likely gain more trust to you.

There are some companies on the Web that provides ready-to-use E-commerce stores with possibility to drastically customize design for your needs. Some of such companies offer to rent a website and some, like fortunecommerce.com, allow you to gradually buy it out and became the owner of the independent e-store.

Payments.

Be sure that your e-commerce website accepts credit cards online. Establishing a merchant account may be pretty expensive but take your time, find company that matches your budget. However some merchants don’t accept all kinds of credit cards. And I doubt you want to lose money because some visitors may have credit card that your merchant account do not accept.

Hosting and Security.

As usual website, E-commerce needs hosting as well, however, reliability of hosting for E-commerce should be stronger. So before signing up with a hosting company I advise you to test their feedback. Contact them by email or by phone or both and see how quickly they respond and how helpful they are. You have to figure out how much disk space and bandwidth you will need. It’s your money, so be sure to select reliable hosting with 99,9% time up of their servers.

SSL (Single Socket Layer) – certificate. It provides safety of money transfer on your website. Many hosting companies supply their clients with SSL, so make sure that you will have it. As I mentioned, there are companies, like fortunecommerce.com, that provides ready-to-use E-commerce stores and all of them have SSL certificate included to the e-store they offer to rent or buy. Bear in mind that people want to be sure that their sensitive information is secured.

Best of luck in your pursue!