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5 Steps to Launching Your Online Store

Step 1: Select The Right Web Hosting Plan

Base your Web hosting plan choice on your storefront needs. For example, the plan you choose should directly relate to the number of products you will offer, the size of your customer base and any special features you'll want to include such as product images.

Your online store is only one—albeit a very important—portion of your entire Web site. Your site should also include details about your company, your products and services and a contact us form.

Hostway's Ecommerce solutions build on our award-winning Web hosting plans and include plenty of disk space, generous traffic allowances and an easy-to-use and reliable domain name specific email system.

Step 2: Choose A Shopping Cart

Hostway's shopping cart solutions enable you to:

  • Quickly create a professional-looking store
  • Give customers intuitive site navigation
  • Process orders securely with our secure server access (SSL)
  • Calculate shipping cost and taxes automatically
  • Easily manage orders received
All of Hostway's Ecommerce plans are automatically equipped with Merchant Manger—a powerful, highly customizable and easy-to-use Web-based store building and managing tool .

Step 3: Select a Domain Name for your Web site

Before you can launch your online store, you must register a domain name—your Web address. Your domain name should be simple for visitors to remember and distinguishable from other sites. It is a good idea to choose a name that directly relates to the type of business you own.

If you don't have a domain name already, you will want to register one as soon as possible. For the easiest management, your domain name should be transferred onto your Web host's servers. If you already own a domain name, you will want to initiate a domain name transfer after you choose a Web host.

Hostway makes domain name registration easy. You can register a fully featured domain name directly from us for only $7.95 annually.

If you already have an existing domain name, we highly recommend you transfer it over to our servers. In most cases, we can initiate this free service, so you only have to confirm the transfer with your previous domain name registrar.

It is also a good idea to register many similar domain names or common misspellings of your name and set them as domain aliases to your Web site so that visitors can easily find your store.

If you are not yet ready to build a Web presence, but have an idea in mind for a Web site, you should register the domain name now, while it is available.

Step 4: Accepting Credit Cards

When potential customers visit your site, they want to know that it's a convenient place to shop, which means your site must be equipped to process credit cards.

To process credit cards, you need a merchant account and a secure payment gateway system. A merchant account is relatable to the credit card machines that you see in stores. The only difference is that it fits into your shopping cart software.

Hostway offers a variety of shopping carts that are all compatible with major payment gateway services that connect your store with a merchant account provider. This service includes fraud checks on each transaction as well as the transfer of funds from your customer's credit card to your bank account.

A payment gateway is designed to read the information from order forms and translate it for the merchant account. Though both of these features can be obtained separately, if you have not yet established either one, it's recommended that you shop for them together to save yourself the hassle.

Hostway provides an instant merchant account/payment gateway application so that you can start accepting credit cards within hours. As a Hostway Ecommerce customer, you receive free setup on your merchant account/payment gateway account.

Step 5: Open For Business

Once you are ready to open your site for business, you'll need to generate traffic to have a successful store. The very first step you should take is to submit your site to the search engines. Keep in mind that there are many ways to attract customers to your online store.