The internet is the defining factor for business labelled as ecommerce as it is the essential medium to make it work.

In order to be successful however you need to follow a few simple rules to get the desired response from your ecommerce customers.

The fewer the better steps for the sales process is best

In good ecommerce design it has been proved that there is a direct correlation between the number of clicks a person has to make in order to complete a purchase and the volume of people who abandon their shopping cart before checking out.

You need to make the checkout process as simple as possible on your ecommerce web site so that potential customers are not discouraged easily through poor navigation.

Ensure customers are aware of stock levels

Make sure that customers can check the availability of stock early on in the sales process.

A cardinal sin in ecommerce is to keep stock levels hidden or at least until the checkout is reached, customers will soon get fed up if you let them go through the sales process only to find out at this stage that their product is not available. Visitors on the web can be fickle and soon find another site to purchase from.

Ensure web browser compatibility

Make sure you view your site in a variety of browsers to ensure that it is presented correctly. Make sure that you at least view your site in Internet Explorer and Firefox as these are the two most commonly used browsers.

Use only useful descriptive words in your hyperlinks

Name your links appropriately using a sensible description that means something to your customers. For instance, ‘Music players section A’ is much less descriptive than ‘iPod Nano range’.

You need to ensure that your hyperlinks actually work

Make sure that all the hyperlinks work on your site and that they click through to the correct destinations. Links leading nowhere or bringing up error pages only give your customers an impression of a amatuer site.

Small, simple graphics are the order of the day

Graphics are great for illustration but you need to ensure they are optimised for the web.

This means that you have to use a graphics program such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks to reduce the file size to ensure that your ecommerce internet solution does not take too long to load its pages.

This exercise becomes a balancing act between quality versus file size but usually a good compromise can be obtained.

Create a straightforward checkout process

The final stage of your ecommerce process is also the most nervous for your customer. You need to ensure that your customer is comforted that you have a safe and secure payment process in which they can entrust their personal details.

Make sure your web site is placed on a server that allows Secure Socket Layer encryption. Tell your customers about the security arrangements you have in place on your ecommerce web site in order to protect their personal information.

If you follow the tips outlined above then you will avoid most of the common pitfalls that you can encounter in developing your ecommerce web site.