BROADCASTS.com

Well, you've chosen a name, went through the hosting process and analyzed your competitors` activities. The point is you are on your way. Let's move on to Design and Development tricky moments discussion. 

Here we'll review what ecommerce solutions the market has to offer today. 

You must have heard of website builders like Wix or Shopify. Their significant advantages are affordable pricing, usability, and simplicity. You can build an ecommerce shop literally in a day. What is also attractive is the perk of having a hosting plan included in the package.

The other useful factor is buying a ready-made design theme if you don't want to invest much in design. These two benefits indeed make such an ecommerce solution look like a perfect choice; however, it's not always the case. 

Your choice is limited by what the website builder foresees if you want to add any additional functionality. Moreover, if it's not included in the package you've purchased, it'll cost extra. 

Secondly, such websites can't be scaled. You'll have to migrate to another ecommerce platform.

Thirdly, SEO promotion is complicated for these websites, so if you have any long-term plans to promote your ecommerce store, they won't happen with website builders like Wix. The only option available in this regard is paid advertisement.

Finally, your online store doesn't quite belong to you. The reality is that you are just renting it. 

The second option on our list is creating an ecommerce website using a framework. Here you'll need coding knowledge or an expert in the area. It's not a cheap alternative and is a sound choice for large businesses. They normally have a dedicated development team or reach out to software development agencies to implement their project. Such ecommerce projects imply proper long-term planning with an already existing business process that serves as a basis for software. 

As you see, there can be a whole team working on ecommerce project design and development. 

The third alternative is opening an online store on open-source platforms. It doesn't require that much time and effort compared to the previous solution described. It all depends on your requests, nowadays it's increasingly popular and works for many cases. Such platform examples are Magento, WordPress, etc. Having a convenient ready-made CMS is a huge benefit for any ecommerce project. The other is the variety of plug-ins and extensions, and each meant best for a particular e-commerce need: documentation audit, SEO, payment methods, etc. 

Like with website builders, you can go with a theme or implement a custom design to stand out. The pros list also includes scalability and multi-functionality. 

Creating an online store using an open-source platform may take a few weeks or months; everything depends on customer traffic. Such ecommerce projects are well-optimized for search engines, which allows setting your marketing strategy way ahead.

That's all for now. During the following episode, we will discuss the promotion and Marketing of an Online Store in 2021.