Thinking of starting an ‘online business’ …

Eran Feinstein is the founder of 3G Direct Pay Limited, a global e-commerce and online payments solutions for the travel and related industries. With over 14 years of leading technology, sales, marketing and operation teams Eran is an authority in the East African e-commerce and payments arena.

Steps for Starting a Successful Online Business

Building a business online is rewarding and relatively easy if you follow a few basic guidelines

Starting an online business takes a bit more than a flashy website. Ecommerce requires building the right website, marketing your products or services to attract customers, and it entails the implementation of a secure payment-processing platform that protects your business, and your customers, against fraud and other risks.

The following is a brief overview of the things you should keep in mind when building your online business.

Design your website for user experience (UX)

User experience is an absolute in today’s fast paced world of educated consumers who expect to be able to find what they are looking for, and make purchases, quickly, easily, and safely.

A few key factors in design UX are the following:

· Site speed

· Information architecture

· Exchange network (IXP)

· Relevance

· Trust

Design your site for mobile customers

More than 60% of online searches are from mobile phones or tablets these days and search engines have made “mobile friendly” a requisite for ranking.

A responsive design that adapts to the users’ mobile device is best, and many content management system (CMS) templates come this way out of the box. If, however, you are creating a mobile version of your existing site, consider the following tips:

· Design for touch screen, use buttons and leave enough finger space

· Provide feedback for each user action so they’ll know they were successful

· Redesign drop-down tap menus and clearly separate options

· Minimize text input, use a “next” button to avoid scrolling

· Use mobile-specific features: make all phone numbers click-to-call, and link your address

· Addressing the limitations of smaller screens, including modifying site navigation, images, and text size.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization helps the search engines find your site and rank it among the others. The objective of SEO is to help your website rank higher than your competitors so that your company can be found on the Internet. I think its good to remember that search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are essentially service providers: they help the public find the information, services and products that they are searching for on the web.

There are two fundamental aspects to effective SEO: Onsite SEO and Offsite SEO (these days, more often referred to as “content marketing.”

Onsite SEO includes data, and metadata, such as the following:

· Keyword focused, relevant, well written, and dynamic content

· Titles

· Header tags

· Alt tags

· Descriptions

· XML Site maps

· Custom 404 pages

It also includes the more technical aspects of website development such as w3c compliant code, semantics, cross browser compatibility, robots.txt, security, speed, mobile ready platforms, and rich snippets.

These things help the search engines “crawl” and read your website in order to determine relevancy and value for their own clients: those who are using their service to search the web.

Drive customers to your site

Hire a professional unless you are an expert content marketer or have great search engine optimization (SEO) skills. Content marketing means regularly updated, impeccably written, original editorial content and quality images for the maximum effect of keyword usage and SEO. It takes time and careful planning to meet Google’s ever-changing algorithms, which determine a site’s ranking. If you get the mix wrong, your rankings will drop. That goes for your mobile site, as well, if your main site is not responsive.

As a new online entrepreneur, you have plenty to do. Don’t try to do everything yourself or cut corners by choosing low-budget providers; always try to get the best service you can afford. Getting the security, design, marketing, and payment processing right from the very beginning will make operating your business easier and more cost-efficient as your company grows.

Collect data, analyze, tweak, and test

The bottom line is, if you don’t know the results of all your hard work, you’re probably wasting a good deal of time and money. Make sure that you or your Webmaster installs Webmaster tools and analytics scripts on your website for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

When you run special campaigns, such as email blasts, banner ads, paid ads, podcasts, or social media posts, contests and opt-in forms, be sure to use tracking links such as the free Google URL Builder so that you can determine where your traffic is coming from and measure the results.

Run reports and analyze often so that you can utilize the information to make adjustments where needed.

Setting up online and mobile payments

First things first: security is the most important factor. If your customers don’t feel that their details are safe, they won’t buy from you. Your site will need Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) as well as security certification. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) combats fraud globally by increasing controls around cardholder data and limiting its exposure.

PCI DSS certification verifies:

• Physical security – offices and data centers
• Strong cryptography, security protocols
• Thorough staff training
• Supplier agreements
• Encrypting transmission of cardholder data
• Firewalls
• Intrusion detection
• File integrity management
• Regularly testing security systems and processes

A Level 1 certification is the best protection for any business that handles credit card information.

You have a wide choice of payment service processors (PSPs) available, so how do you choose the right one? Use the checklist below to guide you in your selection:

· Are they compatible with your existing site software? If you use third-party software on your website, such as Shopify, is the PSP a good fit?

· Do they only support merchants in your country or do they provide cross-border processing services? If you have a pan-African business, obviously you don’t want to limit your options. Which currencies do they support?

· What are their fees? All PSPs charge a fee per transaction; some also charge a monthly fee. Transaction fees can be a flat charge, a percentage of the transaction value, or both.

· What’s your transaction volume? Usually percentage fees decrease as transaction volume increases.

· Where do payments take place? PSPs typically allow businesses to process online payments on their own websites as long as they have PCI DSS certification. Otherwise, they transfer customers to their secure hosted payment page.

· What kind of payment mechanisms do they support? Can your customers use credit or debit cards? What about mobile payment? And ACH electronic check transactions?

· What other features do they offer? You may need anti-fraud protection and chargeback management; do they offer those services, and what are their fees?

· What kind of technical support do they offer? Choose a PSP that will be available to support you when you need it, and not just when it’s convenient for them.

It’s worth it to do your homework and get everything right from the start: Irritated customers aren’t repeat customers, and the mistake of hiring the wrong processor can be an extremely costly one.

Building an online business is a time consuming but worthy process. Don’t expect overnight ranking and success; there are no magic bullets. However, with the right tools and attention to detail, you’ll soon have a website that is worthy and capable of outpacing your competitors.