Launching an ecommerce web store online for the upcoming holiday season. Here's the top 7 items to ensure your online web store success.

1. Visit your Competition online including top of the line ecommerce sites www.amazon.com, www.ebay.com, www.apple.com (always a winner for new hot looks), www.circuitcity.com, www.nordstrom.com and see if you can figure out the "best practices" between the sites - like putting a toll free number on the top right.
2. Just look at each site and figure out the CORE effects you will want to be on your site which stands for web text that is Convincing, a value that is just slightly less than Outrageous, credibility that is Realistic, and an Ecommerce platform that is intuitive and sensible.  
3. Don't do it all yourself. Working with an expert individual or experienced team of professionals is a wise investment. Once you've compiled your CORE list of what you need and what you don't then consider hiring at the very least a project manager who has the ability to see your project through from beginning to completion. This will include helping you build your Web site, host it, register your domain name, maintain the site once it's up and running and troubleshoot problems as they arise.
4. Get an ecommerce shopping cart. This is where i get to shameless plug my WebCart platform. The shopping cart platform is the online software that enables customers to select, order and pay for the goods and services they require. Multiple payment options like credit card, paypal, or even bill me later, make it simple for your customers to place an order.
5. Set up your merchant account and your gateway account. This will enable you to accept orders and payments for Amex, Visa, Mastercard and even Discover. The goal is to make product selection and payment as convenient and secure as possible for your customers and for you.
6. Load up the products in your online catalog. Make sure that the organization of your online store is logical and intuitive. Your customers need to be able to find what they want quickly and easily, through intuitive links to product categories and an efficient product search function. At the back end, a good Web services provider will make it easy to add products, change prices and manage all of the technical details that help you "manage your store."
7. Make buying easy and secure. Design your site to ensure a seamless, one-click flow between shopping and checkout/purchase. And if you want to prosper online, your customer's personal information must be absolutely secure. Your Web services provider will help you purchase and install a secure Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate from a company like GeoTrust.

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EvePearl.com has that interesting business combination of a products AND services shopping cart / ecommerce platform like WebCart© that could deliver a customized look and feel for each of her product sets. But at the same time she needed a content platform to offer up information related to her makeover services. Eve - otherwise known as the Makeup Artist to the Stars - was recommended by the visionary Eisenberg brothers at that newly public web conversion and analytics consulting company FutureNow. A good part about the project was that though it complex in scope, she basically knew what she wanted and that made the core of the project relatively simple. First, Eve wanted a new look and feel for her site. Second is she wanted to introduce a whole new level of functionality for her customers to offer them video casts, interviews, an updated high end photo gallery and lots of other web content she could not easily manage with her prior Content Management Solution (CMS) software. Besides adding in all this brand spanking new function set, she also wanted to be able to manage updating the content on her own. So the short story is that my angry web designer delivered a first draft in 9 days I think and at it's core, he made it happen. Just to give you an idea of the process. We reviewed over 500 web sites for keywords like cosmetics, beauty supplies, makeup, beautician and makeovers. We built a spreadsheet of best practices in terms of what links were common between most of the closely competitive sites. We looked for common icons that would give her new site the credibility the customers expected. And finally, we looked at color schemes to see what we could efficiently create without requiring customers to learn a whole new site comprehension. If you review the Case Studies section of my site, you should find a more comprehensive review of the steps we took to redesign her site and then integrate the old content into the new platform. I am very proud of this site because it took a lot of effort from all parties involved and everyone delivered a noteworthy effort. This does not always happen and that is why I am mentioning it now.

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Clearly, CMKCosmetics.com is not necessarily a new web design project but I am posting about it now because it is in a similar industry to EvePearl.com and since I've gotten my feet pretty wet with cosmetics, it makes sense to put up a little information about this site too. CMKCosmetics.com is an interesting situation because she sells cosmetics to everyone in one sense, because everyone has the potential to use her makeup products to look more beautiful. However, she also has an exciting niche market opportunity to sell cosmetics to a very particular type of customer. That niche is served by her brand of Shabbat Cosmetics. These are lipsticks and eyeshadows for example that are formulated in such a way that Rabbis approve of their use on the holy sabbath. Without getting into the details too much, not only did this site have the opportunity to showcase products for a definable audience, but it also had to take into consideration the social mores of that community. This meant that the photos used on the site had to be meet a certain level of acceptability for modesty. As well, the whole color scheme of the site had to be in a sense "sensible" and not too flashy. That is a tough bill to fill to sell "sex" but not look like it too much. Well maybe she wasn't trying to sell sex, but it's a pretty fine line between getting all dolled up looking good and crossing the threshold to a bedroom. Yet, that may be a male point of view. From the woman's perspective beauty and all the accoutrements used to enhance one's beauty, are not really about sex but about a self perception. In the fashion world, you are what you wear - and not necessarily for an ulterior motive. So the CMK cosmeticsweb project was noteworthy more because of the limitations presented by the niche audience than because it gave me a chance to showcase some enhancements we had made to the WebCart Ecommerce platform. We are always adding new configuration options to WebCart so it is almost like commonplace - though some of the features you will see on CMK are quite nice. look at all the alternate images of the lipsticks to get an idea of what I mean.

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