The creation of e-commerce sites accelerated greatly during the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown, in fact, many companies and SMEs realised that nowadays it is extremely important to have a digital tool that allows you to expand and evolve your business.
An e-commerce site, in fact, is a real digital shop open all day, every day; it therefore represents a huge opportunity to increase sales and expand the visibility of your brand.
But what are the steps to tackle when you decide to open a website dedicated to e-commerce?
Digital strategy
The first step to take when you decide to open an online shop is to think about a digital strategy that allows you to respond effectively to the needs of your audience.
- What audience will my website target? (Age, gender, interests…)
- How do I want to present my products?
- How can I stand out from competitors?
- Am I ready to handle orders, payments and shipping effectively?
- How many products do I want to manage and what features will they have?
These are some questions we should ask ourselves before starting to design the website, because only based on these answers can we move on to the next step: choosing the CMS.
Choosing the CMS
The CMS (Content Management System) is the software tool that allows us to manage the content of our sites simply and effectively.
Today there are various CMSs with different features and purposes: from WordPress, used above all for creating editorial-style websites, to Prestashop and Magento for creating complex, structured e-commerce sites.
Is it possible to create e-commerce sites with WordPress too? The answer is yes, through the famous plugin “WooCommerce” which adds to the CMS all those selling features that it does not have natively.
Prestashop and Magento, on the other hand, are born as CMSs designed solely for e-commerce and have many advanced features for managing products, payments and shipping, already integrated into the system without the need for further implementation.
For an e-commerce site with simple features and a limited number of products, WooCommerce may prove to be the right choice; but if we want to create a more structured site with a large number of products and complex pricing rules, the best solution will certainly be Magento or Prestashop.
The choice is therefore not simple and must be made very carefully, knowing that each CMS has its own specific technical characteristics that must be analysed during the site design phase; you need to understand clearly whether the needs of the e-commerce site you want to build fit one piece of software rather than another.
In recent years, Prestashop has become the most popular CMS for creating e-commerce sites thanks to its ease of use and scalability.
It was born in 2007 in France as an Open Source project, and today there are more than 300,000 websites in the world that use this CMS!
Customising themes in Prestashop
The “theme” is the visual component that makes our site attractive, simple and easy to use and that presents our products in an intuitive and effective way. The themes used by Prestashop use the templating system called “Smarty”, which developers can use to expand and modify the theme itself, adding new features.
For Prestashop too, as for other CMSs, you can install themes that use visual builders (such as Elementor, for example) that make it easier to insert text content with pleasant animations and graphic effects, without leaving out a fundamental feature: the responsive version!
Our website, in fact, must be visible and usable by all users, both from their computer and from their tablet or smartphone: builders help us with precisely this!
Modules and extensions
As we said earlier, Prestashop was developed to meet a very specific need: that of e-commerce.
It can happen, however, that you want to add particular features to your site to make it also an informational site, such as through a blog.
For example, if I have an e-commerce site selling food products, I might want to add a section with recipes and tips on using my products. This feature is not present in our CMS, but it can be added by installing a specific module downloadable from the official Marketplace.
Or, the need may arise to offer your customers a payment method not included in the standard installation, for example the Nexi or Satispay POS. In this case too, it will be possible to add this feature through one or more modules.
Prestashop’s modules, therefore, are add-on components that increase and add features that our site does not have in its “basic” version and so, as you can easily imagine, the possibilities for expansion are really wide!
Conclusion
In addition to the analysis phase and the choice of CMS, the last step in our process of publishing a digital-shop site is visibility.
A “newborn” e-commerce site must be supported by digital marketing activities to make our site and our products known to the public. In this case, it is necessary to consider creating advertising campaigns on search engines and the main social networks, as well as indexing and SEO positioning.
