Five Critical Components of an E-commerce Website Design

Every type of website has specific website design components. Several tech articles on the Internet outline seven "critical" components or eight "must haves", but for an e-commerce site, most website design gurus agree on five components that are critical to success.

1. Website Design
Website design isn't just a way to make your site look pretty - it's a crucial part of an e-commerce website. Customers buying your products want to see something professional and simple. The finished results of the design should be easy to navigate, from seeing the product to ordering and check out.

2. Merchant Account
It's impossible to have a successful e-commerce website without a merchant account. It allows you to accept major credit cards and other forms of payment. Merchant accounts for e-commerce sellers are considered high-risk, however, and banks are wary of giving merchant accounts for this purpose. When looking for a merchant account, watch for hidden fees and high setup costs.

3. Secure Gateway
Obviously, a secure gateway is an essential design component for any e-commerce website. Your customers will be sending you personal, sensitive payment information. You'll need an https address header - the "s" indicating that you're on a secure gateway - and a secure system such as Secure Socket Layers (SSL) to protect yourself and your customers.

4. Shopping Cart System
The shopping cart is a customer-friendly interface for ordering products. While this isn't critical for shops selling one or two products, it's a fantastic back-end tool for a website with several products. Added to the design, this software allows the ordering of several products, then calculates the cost and gives your client a total. Of the several types of software available, some also calculate sales tax.

5. Payment Transaction Software
The shopping cart system allows customers to order, the payment transaction software allows them to - well, pay. This software processes the customer order information and sends the data to a credit card authorization network. The network verifies the credit card, shipping address and billing address.

Add-ons
Along with critical components, several add-ons are available for an e-commerce website design, flash animation, product catalogs and an advanced media search are just a few.

Flash animation is a great addition to a website design, as long as they're small, animated parts such as headers. The more animation used, the longer it takes for your website to load, as well as giving more things to distract the customer from buying. Flash animation is better in small doses.

Product catalogs are an excellent addition to your website design if you have a wide range of products. They're easy to update and much more cost effective than a printed version.

Advanced media search gives your customers the ability to access any media-related files or documents on your products. This includes reviews or any "how-to" resources.

As you can see, there's more to an e-commerce website design than just throwing the site up on the Internet. With careful planning and a little professional expertise, your website design can have a high impact on your customers and keep them coming back for more.