Small Business Web Stores^SM was built to help small business customers sell their products on the Web. Small businesses serious about ecommerce typically progress through stages when developing their Web stores. Each stage in the ecommerce lifecycle requires a discreet set of skills and expertise. We organized our Company into service departments you can count on when you need them.

Once you’ve laid the groundwork, the real fun begins. The creation of a Web store should be taken just as seriously as a brick-and-mortar store. You need to think about the look and feel of the store, what kind of message you want to convey when “someone walks through the doors,” and where and how to position your products. On the Web, you have to take it one step further and configure the Web store to accept customer payments, properly describe the products in a limited amount of space, and configure order receipts. In short, there’s a whirlwind of things to do to create a professional and appealing Web store.

When in doubt, call upon the branding and design specialists in our Creative Services department.  Our Creative Services team can develop a completely custom Web store for you, all the way from logos, to product images, to illustrations (or anything in between), as well as provide all of the ecommerce logic (taxes, shipping charges, payment processing) needed to get your site off the ground. Don’t need a completely custom Web store? No problem. Let us create some dazzling custom templates that can be imported directly into your new Small Business Web Stores account, taking you just steps away from going live. Please contact us to obtain a quote today.

Once your new Web store is built, you need to have a strategy to attract the right visitors to your website. The most popular way to drive quality traffic to your new Web store is through the search engines. Small Business Web Stores provides a few ways for you get your feet wet in the world of search engines.

• SMART Submit: Our search engine submission service is designed to get real results. SMART Submit is free with your Executive account and just $39.95/year with all other Plans.

• Partnership with Yahoo: When it comes to search engines, success is sometimes a moving target. Search engine rankings work based on proprietary algorithms used to rank all websites within their index. Your ranking really depends on how “relevant” the search engine thinks your site is to specific keywords people search on.

It is not uncommon for Web store owners to find themselves ranked at the top of the listings for specific search results one week and be buried under the fifth page of search results just a week later.

One way around this and to help guarantee yourself a position at the top is to engage in Pay Per Click advertising. All of the major search engines offer this method of advertising. It’s a quite simple concept.

You pick the keywords and search phrases on which you want your ads to appear. You need to “bid” on those phrases (could be as low as $0.10 per click). When someone actually clicks on your ad through the search engine, you pay the search engine the amount you “bid.” It can be a relatively inexpensive way to appear at the top of the search results and attract visitors to your Web store.

Small Business Web Stores has partnered with the juggernaut of the industry, Yahoo, to help you get a jump start. Sign up for any Small Business Web Stores Plan and we’ll deposit $50 into your Yahoo Pay-Per-Click account.

Ecommerce mavens who are already selling products on the Web, or those merchants who know they have the “next great thing” have more to worry about than just product sales. To be extremely successful, you need to gain a high level of efficiency in the process of selling and fulfilling products. If you’re one of these people, most certainly you’ll want to connect your Web store to other programs, software, or websites as these will become the key to future profitable growth. For example, in order to avoid double entry of each order, you may want to connect Small Business Web Stores directly to your accounting software for nightly batch updates (our system already helps you connect to QuickBooks).

Or, to facilitate smoother fulfillment, maybe you want your new Web store to automatically send new orders to your fulfillment house?

Or, maybe you signed a partnership with another firm and require a robust reporting system to allow them to see new orders, but nothing else.

When you start thinking about taking your Web store to the next level, be sure to contact our Business Systems Development gurus. They can provide you with a realistic guide of what’s do-able and provide the programming assistance to untangle your Web.