How to Design Your First-Ever E-Commerce Store

by Alex Schnee

Once you have decided to build out your first e-commerce store, it’s likely you feel overwhelmed with everything you need to create in order to make it work properly. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be ask difficult as you would think in order to create a store you love and that serves you well when creating your business.

Here’s what you need to know about designing the store of your dreams and making some sales.

Know your hosting

The first step before you even begin to consider what your site might look like and how your pages will be organized is where your site will live. Will you use an e-commerce platform with built-in templates? Or will you try and build your site from scratch even if it takes a little longer than you would like? Your hosting needs to be solid because it also needs to be able to handle the traffic coming its way and to provide support if something ends up going wrong.

Create your brand kit

Your brand kit will have a number of things that will come in handy when you are digging into design, and most designers typically build this out first before they go ahead and start messing with some of the more technical aspects of their site. Your brand kit might include what colors you are planning on using, the type of font you want for both your desktop version and your mobile version, photos, and more. Having this will save you a lot of time from having to dig through your files in order to find your logo, hex colors, and more.

Think about features

Will you need any additional features in order to make your site function the way you want it to? Now is the time to think about it! The good thing is that you don’t necessarily need a ton of coding experience in order to make your site. With a method like headless commerce, you can make changes to the frontend of your site without altering the backend, so you don’t have to worry about crashing it right when you are ready to launch. Knowing which features you want beforehand can go a long way toward ensuring your site is ready for visitors.

Test it out

You’re going to want to test your site pretty thoroughly before you go ahead and share it with others. This means asking friends and family to take a look and use it on a number of different types of devices. It might look great on your screen, but it can look completely different on a phone or tablet. You’ll also want to double check your checkout process to make sure everything works the way it should so your customers won’t have an issue/

In summary

Designing an e-commerce store for the first time can be a bit intimidating, but it can also be one of the most rewarding things you can do as an entrepreneur. With these tips in mind, you’re likely to have a store you feel proud of.