I am starting to hear this question more and more as I am working with small business owners build online stores. Most business owners want to add ecommerce functionality to their existing website but think they have to spend thousands of dollars to redo their website. This simply isn’t true, you can add a separate store to your website and link it to your existing website.
Two Ways To Add Ecommerce To An Existing Website
Building with WordPress
If you have built your site with WordPress, we can install a robust ecommerce software and help you build your ecommerce store using your existing WordPress site. This is a great way to go because your store shopping cart will be integrated with your existing wordpress website.
Adding a link To A Separate Store
A second solution would be to build your online store on a separate domain name (ex: store.yourdomain.com) and link it to your existing website so when your customers visit your website they can click the store link and enter into your online store.
Securing Your Online Store
No matter how you build your website you need to make sure every piece of software is up to date or your online store can get hacked, this is one of the biggest problems on the web, but there are solutions. If you decide to build an online store for your business the worst thing that can happen to you is getting hacked so your store stops generating revenue for your business or puts your customers sensitive information is great danger, both these situations are not fun to be in so it is extremely important to make sure your website is safe, here are a few things you do
Purchase an SSL Certificate for your site – This helps encrypt data on your site so no one can steal it and it also verifies you as a trusted seller.
Update Every Piece Of Software – Websites are built with software that is hosted on the cloud and if you don’t update software, hackers can find vulnerabilities and hack into your site to do their damage.
There are many other ways to set up an ecommerce store with your site, we can go into details in another blog post, but the ones mentioned above are the most popular solutions. If you have questions or want to learn more about turning your website into a revenue generating machine instead of just a digital flier you can ask questions here.