Designing and building e-commerce websites shouldn’t be a challenge especially with today’s technology. You can focus on brand marketing and developing your products while turning to a web design company like Public Advertising Agency to handle all the technical details. 

However, although you don’t need to learn a programming language to build a rocking e-commerce website, it’s important that you at least understand the basics of what your website design service provider delivers in terms of capabilities. This is important even after you get your operation up and running.

Here are the 8 technical aspects of an e-commerce website that you need to know or at least have a general understanding of.

 

Technical Aspects of an Ecommerce Website

 

1. Website Security

Data security and privacy are the hottest issues today that keep consumers on their toes. You want your brand new e-commerce website to be safe from hackers. 

TLS is now the standard for communications security over a network. The 256-bit Transport Sockets Layer (TLS) encryption allows an end-to-end secure connection across all data and transactions performed on your website. Websites should meet the TLS 1.2 standard. A browser or operating system (OS) upgrade is required if they currently support TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1. All data is encrypted from the moment a user accesses your website to when they exit.

Your e-commerce website development company should also provide you with a payment processing tool that can bring extra security during transactions. A good example is Stripe, which ties in with e-commerce tools to provide Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliance, with no additional work on your end.

 

2. Website Performance

If your website is too slow compared to your competitors, then you’re likely to lose customers. Best practice dictates that websites should load in less than 100 milliseconds (ms). If the website doesn’t load at that speed, your service provider should already be looking to find a solution before you even notice.

At Public Advertising Agency, we have website monitoring tools to help us constantly track page load times to ensure your website is operating at peak levels whether it is on mobile or desktop.

 

3. Scale According to Your Needs

You want to think long term. You may have a small store now but you would also want to think down the line. You want to easily scale up and see what happens to your load speed as website traffic increases.

When your inventory grows quickly or if you’re planning to launch marketing campaigns like flash sales and promos, you’ll want to make sure your website can handle it. Otherwise, you will risk damaging your customer experience leaving them frustrated and clicking over to another store. 

Monitor website traffic and peak user load times to prevent UX issues and scale server resources effectively.

 

4. Be Mobile Ready

A good e-commerce website company will help you build out your site on both mobile and desktop, either mobile first or with responsive web design. Having a great desktop site with a bad mobile experience means you’re alienating roughly half of your potential customers.

Not only do you want your website to perform well on all devices for user experience, Google has officially switched to mobile-first indexing.  Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device, so if your mobile site isn’t up to par, your search engine organic ranking will match.

 

5. Cloud Hosting

Most service providers are using cloud storage to store data such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. Find out which best fits your business by searching factors such as backup, disaster recovery (DR), security, and uptime.

Choosing your preferred cloud storage is critically important as it will be responsible for whether or not your stored data is safe, how often your website goes down, and if you can access your data again in case of emergencies.

 

6. Website Updates

Although auto-updates are available, not all areas of your website can be updated automatically. You want to go with a service provider that you can rely on for website maintenance needs.

 

7. Data Engineering

Ask your vendor if they have a dedicated data engineering team who can help you build custom website performance reports. Data analysis can help you determine how your users are accessing your website, if carts are abandoned too frequently, or if your website is too difficult to navigate.

 

8. Third-Party Integrations

Your business will need a variety of software to improve your overall operations and streamline crucial workflow. You want to be able to smoothly integrate your marketing tools to your website so that you can track data effectively and accurately. This gives you a better insight about which marketing promotions worked and, who bought what, and if you can still reclaim abandoned carts.

Choose a provider that offers native integrations with as many third-party tools as possible. The more native integrations, the more options you’ll have when it comes to expanding your toolset.

 

These are just a few of the technical aspects of building e-commerce websites that you should know about. By having a basic understanding of how your website should work and how to optimize it, you will be able to communicate your expectations better to your vendor.