Performance of An E-Commerce Website!!

Performance of An E-Commerce Website!!

The term E-Commerce is derived from two words "Electronic" and "Commerce",which simply means doing business over large electronic networks, primarily internet.

As today's era is a technological one and internet is in reach of almost 51% of world's population, every business is now heading towards the electronic platform where they can connect with their customers globally and for that, one must have their own business website or their products on other E-commerce websites.

Today, I'll brief you about the requisites for an ideal website and how to enhance it's performance.

Website -  It's like you want to live in a city you must have a place so website is nothing but a place where your customers can find you in the city aka on internet. Technically, It's the group of web pages which consists of multimedia content as in images, videos & which is typically identified with a common name (domain name) and is available on web/internet search engines.

To get settled in a city, it's ones choice that what kinda accommodation he/she will have depending upon his needs and budget.
Some might prefer a flat or dormitory other may wish to move in a personal pent house or villa.

Similarly there are many ways to develop your website and you choose them as per your requirement and need.

Initially, one must know the place in city where he wish to accommodate. Everyone choose a place depending on their requirement. Same goes with a website - There are many E-commerce platforms which you can choose depending on their specifications and limitations. 

I'll help you out with few of them and with their pro's and con's.

But before that it's important to know that the basic requirements in terms of a good living is it should be spacious, have fine interiors, secure, open to guests, should have basic amenities. Similarly if talking about a E-Commerce website, there are few must have features which I would like to suggest first- 

• A good e-commerce website should have Content Management System (CMS) capabilities. A CMS is a system which manages all the creation and modification of digital content. It consists of features like format management, history editing and version control indexing, search, and retrieval.  In simple terms CMS takes cares of the contents lying on a web page.
• Fast Load Time - Your website should open within 2 sec. 
• Mobile Friendly - It should be accessed through mobile.
• Ease - Of - Use - All the information and path-ways should be simple enough so that could be understood by a some one who is accessing it first time.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Friendly - SEO is a process through which the concern technicians make sure that your website comes within top search results. They do this by following certain techniques like using proper Keywords, putting Back-links, checking Content Quality, Content Length Based on these a search engine like google, bing or yahoo gives your website a page rank.
• Scaling Abilities- a good website should have scaling abilities which means able to be changed in size or scale as per their platforms.
• Secure Payment Gateways - Your website should be secure enough as it'll be payment details,card details. Would be good if it should follow PCI-DSS (Payments Cards Industry Data Security Standard) guidelines. 
• Should have good UP-TIME .
• Integrated Blog or Article Section - Customers love to read and get knowledge mostly when they shop, thus it will be an good option to engage your customers.
• Customer Support - There should be an assistance available for your customer most preferable 24/7 or with a quick response within 24 hours.

I hope the information I shared above was quite useful and now as I promised, I'll try to en-light you in terms of E-commerce platforms. 

1. SHOPIFY - 

A Canadian-based eCommerce solution, it has been helping online businesses across the globe with a sharp focus on the trending social commerce and mobile shopping. 

PRO'S

• Abandoned cart recovery.
• For $9, you can integrate Shopify directly with your FB account and make it an ecommerce store.
• Mobile-friendly shopping cart, seller mobile apps.
• Round the clock technical support via live chat, phone as well as tutorials, along with their powerful Shopify community forum.

CON'S

• Additional transaction fee you'll be liable to pay if you don't use Shopify Payment.
• It runs on his own developed coding language " Liquid ", thus making the eCommerce store owners to pay an incremental price for customization.

2. Magento -

Released in March 2008, Magento is an open source eCommerce website platform. Its reliability and scalability has made it one of the most popular eCommerce platforms available today.

PRO'S

• Open source and unlimited customization options.,Usability and Manageability.
• More than 9000 plugins and extensions to make room for scalability.
• Free social media extensions.
• Extensive resource library for demos, new plugins, store management and everything around ecommerce stores.

CON'S

• To use Magento one should either be a programmer or have a team of programmers working on his or her team as it is written in hardcore technical language.

• Using Magento is expensive as well if you are using it's enterprise version.

• Need of an third -party investment if you do not have programmers in staff.

3. BigCommerce

Since its inception in 2009,It has more than 55,000 online stores to its credit and is lauded as one of the most prominent eCommerce software providers.


PRO'S

The massive number of built-in features including (but not limited to) newsletters, coupons, shipping, tax, and analytics. No transaction fee.

• Responsive themes (paid as well as free) and consistent user experience on desktop as well as mobile.
• Easy store integration with Facebook, eBay, Google shopping and many comparison sites.
• Easy setup wizard, tutorial videos, detailed guides with visual illustrations and demos.

CON'S

• It is hard to run an multi vendor store like amazon on this platform.

• With only 7 free themes, it lacks behind its competitors which are providing 20 free themes on an average.

4. WooCommerce

It is a big brand in eCommerce industry which provides a free word press login.

You must be thinking what is that so called WordPress - then please be informed that WordPress is a free and open-source CMS based on PHP (hypertext preprocessor) and MySQL. It comes along with a Secure payment gateway and a shopping cart that both work really well.

PRO'S

Easy to manage admin panel.

• Unlimited product categories.
• Extensive range of plugins and extensions of all sorts.
• Secure payment gateway and shopping cart.

CON'S

• Integration of shopping cart is completely requires additional investment.
• One can only use Woocommerce only he knows about Wordpress.
• This platform is not scalable as compared to others thus its performance will get affected once your website traffic ↑.

5. VTEX

VTEX is a Brazilian cloud based Ecommerce Platform. Their customer base includes local business chains of some of the major players in the world, including Wal-Mart, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola, Sony, Disney, L'Oreal, Lego, Staples.

PRO'S

• It has an unique feature which makes it different from all other eCommerce Platforms and that is its Password Free Checkout which means no password is needed for logging in.
• It can be integrated with virtual currencies like Bitcoins.

CON'S

• It do not provide a complete ownership of your store to you.
• Being developed on SaaS (Software as a Service) it's source code will remain with the Company.

These were most popular eCommerce platforms which we have discussed here and there are many more ...

Before making decision keep this in mind that an eCommerce platform is not a "one size fits all" solution. All the eCommerce platforms discussed in above are built for different kinds of business requirements. You must make a calculated decision and choose a platform that serves your needs best.

 Now I'll assist you with the other important things which website needs to enhance it's performance.

Let's say if you have chosen an appropriate platform and have developed your website well, still you need to take select the web hosting which you would like to have for your websites.

Don't get confused that what is this now - just relate as whenever a guests arrives at your place you host them, Right!! Similarly when your website develops and gets ready to be on-boarded on the internet it needs someone to host it (guide it).

Web Hosting - 

"Hosting is a business of housing, serving & maintaining files for one or more websites."

The fundamental requirement for a web hosting is a Server.

Server is might be a computer, a electronic device or a program that is constructed to manage network resources. They are simple devices with some extra features added to them like high performance RAMs, Super Faster processor, etc. 

An web hosting company stores your website's data in their server, making accessible via the WWW i.e. World Wide Web.

Now, Hosting itself has various kinds and usages depending upon your requirements - 

These are as follows :

Different Type of Web Hosting

Shared Hosting -  It is one in which the service provider serves for multiple pages of multiple websites from a single server. 

It is an cost efficient hosting as cost gets divided among different websites generally advisable for beginners but is usually not sufficient for Web sites with high traffic.

Dedicated Hosting - It is that kind of hosting in which you leases or rents a server from service provider which serves only your website or we can say dedicates to you website only. No other website can be served through it.

As it is dedicated to your site only, you will be liable for every charge. Cost is higher as compared to Shared but it can take heavy traffic.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting - This hosting is based on servers which are crafted using virtualization mechanism. Basically it is a combo of dedicated and shared hosting in which your website occupies a particular part in a server of which you have total access like on-off, uploading software etc.  It is like you are living in an apartment where you can access your flat in whatever way you want to use. Generally it is less expensive as compared to dedicated hosting.

CDN (Content Delivery Network) - Also known as (Content Distribution Network) is an network of geographically distributed servers which are also known as proxy servers and their data centers. 

CDN Network

Let's understand this with an example - lets suppose you are sitting in US and requesting some data from an Japanese website, so it would work like  - 

1. you send a request from New York through www which actually converts your request into HTML. 

2. Server at Tokyo reads the information and provides you with required data.

3. data follows the same path  through which it got transmitted from New York to Tokyo.

This process took time as there were no proxy servers available at US.

To minimize the time difference and increase the efficiency CDN servers are used which helps us in transmitting and providing data really fast. 

Actually what happens is that these CDN servers makes an copy of data from main Data Center and scatters it all over the network.

Ideally, If you are new to eCommerece you must select shared hosting and when required you can gradually move on other kinds else you could decide better as it would be your business decision!!!

Hey Guys !! So was the journey so far.....

Would like to update you with few more topics so that by knowing them you will know lil more aspects of an ECommerce Website.

TTFB - 

It stands for Time To First Byte. It is the measurement used as an indication of the responsiveness of a web server or other network resource. 

It actually measures the duration of the HTTP request generated by user to the first byte of page being received.

Ideally  ↓↓TTFB indicates that you have a well configured server.

Above the Fold Content - 

One of the time-honored guidelines in web design is to keep the most important content "above the fold". Originally used to refer to the upper half of a newspaper page, the term came to mean the part of the page visible without scrolling.

This means when your website loads the very first content which appears first on screen should be very informative and must have capability to engage your customer.

So friends our journey ends here and if you are requiring any more info or help in any aspects whether for website creation, hosting services, CDN you can connect me here - 

https://achtunglabs.com/contact.html

Till then take care!!!

DHEERAJ PANWAR

Product Specialist