Are you eager to establish a successful online business and take control of your ecommerce website? Look no further! In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through the essential steps to acquire and implement your very own ecommerce web hosting service.

From selecting the perfect hosting provider to optimizing your website’s performance, our expert tips and insights will empower you to create a robust online presence and maximize your business’s potential. Let’s dive into the world of ecommerce web hosting and unlock the key to a thriving online store.

To get and implement your own e-commerce web hosting service, you need to follow these general steps:

1. Research and Planning:
   • Conduct market research to understand the demand for e-commerce web hosting services and identify your target market.
   • Define your service offerings, such as the hosting plans, features, and pricing.
   • Assess the competition and determine your unique selling proposition.
2. Infrastructure and Resources:
   • Acquire the necessary infrastructure, including servers, network equipment, and data centers. You can either build your own infrastructure or partner with a reliable hosting provider.
   • Ensure your infrastructure can handle the anticipated volume of websites and provide scalability options for future growth.
   • Set up robust security measures to protect your customers’ data.
3. Website and Billing System:
   • Develop a professional website that showcases your hosting services, features, and pricing plans.
   • Implement a billing system to manage customer subscriptions, payments, and invoicing.
4. E-commerce Platform:
   • Select an e-commerce platform that suits your needs, such as WooCommerce, Magento, or Shopify.
   • Customize the platform to match your branding and integrate it with your website.
   • Set up product listings and configure payment gateways.
5. Customer Support:
   • Establish a support system to assist your customers with technical issues, inquiries, and billing concerns.
   • Offer multiple support channels like email, live chat, and phone support.
   • Train your support staff to provide excellent customer service.
6. Marketing and Promotion:
   • Develop a marketing strategy to attract customers to your e-commerce hosting service.
   • Utilize online marketing channels such as SEO, content marketing, social media, and paid advertising.
   • Consider partnerships with web developers, agencies, or e-commerce platforms to expand your reach.
7. Monitoring and Maintenance:
   • Implement monitoring tools to track server performance, uptime, and security.
   • Regularly update and patch your server software and applications.
   • Offer backup services and disaster recovery plans to safeguard customer data.
8. Legal and Compliance:
   • Ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations, such as data protection and privacy laws.
   • Clearly define your terms of service, acceptable use policy, and refund policy.
   • Consult with legal professionals to ensure your business is operating within the legal framework.

Learn to seamlessly integrate payments into your sites with our state-of-the-art Seamless Payments Solutions, easing the transaction process for your customers.

Remember that setting up and running an e-commerce web hosting service requires technical expertise, infrastructure investment, and ongoing maintenance. It’s important to have a solid business plan and a thorough understanding of the hosting industry to succeed. Consider seeking advice from professionals and consulting with experts if needed.

Ramping up to specialist e-commerce plans will get you powerful product catalogues, stock inventory and other business management tools, and support for more payment methods.

While these products can be packed with features, even the high-end e-commerce plans are designed to be simple to use. Choose a layout, fill in forms to build your product catalogue and your store will start to take shape. There’s still work to do – opening an account to take credit card payments, perhaps – but even web store novices will be able to figure it out as they go along.

Prices are low, too, with one decent starter plan giving you three years hosting for £1.50 ($2.10) a month, or a total of £54 ($76) plus tax. If you’re wondering about e-commerce but not quite sure whether it’s right for you, this gives you a cheap and easy way to test your ideas.

Whether you’re a total e-commerce newbie or you’re already running a busy web store, we’ve found five excellent hosting plans that could take your selling to the next level.

Learning How to Start an Online Store

In this section of the article, we will go over what you need to launch an online store, based on your level of comfort with technology and how much work you are interested in doing yourself.

This sounds like a lot, but do not worry! We will break everything down into bite-sized pieces so that things are less overwhelming.

Read on to learn how to get started with your online store!

what you need to launch online store

What Do I Need to Launch an Online Store?

At a high level, you will need the following 5 points covered to get an online store up and running:

A Product which you can confidently market, represent, and sell.

Display pages for your products. These include product images, descriptions, and other information.

Some type of inventory management, so that your customers cannot order things that are not in stock.

Shopping cart software (so that customers can order multiple products at a time) and some type of checkout process so that you can get paid.

Web hosting, which gets your site online so others can access it.

Beyond the Basics: Adding Value to Your Online Store

These are the bare minimum requirements. Here are some more things you can do to add value to your online store:

Additional website pages or a blog.

Customer service pages, including detailed write-ups of your store policies for things like shipping and handling, exchanges and returns, and refunds. Consider whether an FAQ page would help your site visitors accomplish their goals.

Forums or other methods of interaction available to your customers.

A free feedback app (like Hotjar) to capture site visitor feedback.

A plan to survey customer satisfaction using a free tool like Survey Monkey.

However, these items are just the tip of the iceberg — when it comes to website features, the sky is the limit!

Small business owners, alleviate checkout frustrations with our guide Small Business Shopping Cart Solutions, tailored to meet your unique needs.

eCommerce Web Hosting Service Sites Reviews

Platforms and Plans

In addition to features, I’ll be providing some platform recommendations for you to get started with. You can tweak these according to your specific needs. The goal here is to get you moving forward on your dream of launching your store online.

Shopify e-Commerce Solution

Top all-in-one e-commerce platforms like Shopify provide a treasure trove of how-tos and videos.

Shopify Theme Store

Shopify has its own theme store where you can purchase a pre-built website in almost any design imaginable. You can also customize your selection with your brand colors and many other variables.

Shopify

Shopify — the brand name screams ecommerce. The leading ecommerce platform hits the mark on all the features we discussed above: hundreds of themes for easy design, multiple transaction processing options, and customization that can be done via a drag-and-drop editor or the Shopify API.

To be clear: This is a full-fledged, fully hosted online store builder and management platform, and the pricing reflects the breadth of ecommerce functionalities it includes. This may be a financial bummer for folks who are preparing to launch an online business, but Shopify includes a 14-day trial to give business owners the chance to see if the investment is worthwhile.

Wix

Next up, there’s Wix, a world leader in WYSIWYG website design. This builder is known for industry-specific templates, code-free customization, and an inexpensive experience overall for building basic websites. You’re not going to get as dynamic or complex a site as you might with a more robust platform, but Wix is ideal for solopreneurs, freelance tradesmen, and small businesses that just need to get a foot in the door.

1. Wix

Build a web store in minutes, no experience required

Easy-to-use 

Low prices

Digital products supported

If you’re new to web selling, building your first store can seem complex and intimidating, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Website builder Wix comes with some gorgeous store templates which can be freely customized via its excellent editor. Site design takes a far more visual approach than most of the competition, so for example you can see designs and layouts before you drag them onto the page. Choose your preferred option and it’s displayed with dummy product images, instantly giving you an idea of how the finished store will look.

There’s plenty of power here. Products can be physical or digital, they may be illustrated with images or videos, assigned custom options (colors, size), promoted with coupons, and you can set up your own shipping and tax rules to cope with tricky situations. Plus, with the introduction of Wix Turbo, your site will load much faster.

Wix supports a wide range of payment methods. Exactly what’s on offer depends on your location, but when we tested the service from the UK we were offered Square, Stripe, Moolah, World pay, Wire card and PayPal.

Whatever your choice, you’ll pay the provider only: Wix doesn’t charge any transaction fees.

Your finished store still won’t have as many features as the top e-commerce providers, but Wix is easy-to-use, the $17 (£14) a month price is fair, and it’s a smart way for newbies to dip their toes in the web store waters.

Delve into the future of e-commerce by understanding BigCommerce’s Impact on E-Commerce and how it can revolutionize your online business strategies.

2. iPage

A working web store for just over a pound a month?

Low starter price

Choice of shopping carts

Limited in some areas

Getting your first web store up and running is often an expensive business. Many providers offer little or no e-commerce functionality in their starter plans, and you’ll often have to fork out for a high-end specialist plan before you can do anything useful.

iPage is a rare exception where even the most basic hosting plan gives you more than enough to get started.

A template-based website builder and free web store make it easy to design your shop, for instance. There’s PayPal support for taking payments. You also get integration with your choice of shopping cart (AgoraCart, OpenCart, OSCommerce, PrestaShop, TomatoCart, Zen Cart), a free domain for the first year, and 24/7 phone (toll-free in the US and UK) and chat support to handle any urgent problems that might crop up.

There are limits, too. The website builder only supports a maximum of six pages, for instance, and many customers will expect to be able to pay by credit card as well as PayPal. (You can do that, but you’ll need to sort it out yourself.)

Still, the introductory price is very low at $1.99 (£1.50) a month for up to 36 months, $7.99 (£6) on renewal. It could be worth buying just as a learning environment to experiment with the technology and see what you can do. And if you do go online, you shouldn’t have to sell many products to make your hosting fees back.

3. Site Ground

Professional e-commerce features for a home user price

Easily install top shopping carts

Free SSL

While many web hosts go to huge efforts to highlight e-commerce abilities, others barely mention them at all. SiteGround is a great example: there’s no big “build your web store here” headline, and yet when you look at the details, even its most basic shared hosting plan has a lot of e-commerce power.

A Weebly-based website builder is available to create your store, for instance. HTTP/2 enabled servers and Cloud flare CDN integration boost speeds, reducing the chance that customers will abandon the site. And when it’s time to buy, free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates will give your customers confidence that their payment details are secure.

Site Ground plans include the Softaculous installer, which enables speedy setup of big-name shopping cart and e-commerce tools including PrestaShop, Woo-Commerce and Magneto.

At the time of writing, the company quotes 99.996% uptime for the last 12 months, good news when you’re running something as important as a web store. Although if you do hit trouble, 24/7 support and automatic daily backups should help you quickly recover the situation.

The baseline Startup plan gives you all this for $0.33 (£0.33 for UK) a month for the initial term (this is a limited special offer), rising to $11.95 (£8.95 for UK) on renewal. It has some limits – 10GB web space, a suggested maximum of 10,000 visits a month, support for hosting one website only – but these won’t be an issue for many smaller stores, and there are more powerful plans available if you need them.

Stay ahead in the competitive e-commerce landscape with insights from our comprehensive Ultimate eCommerce Web Hosting Guide, ensuring your website’s success.

4. 1&1 IONOS ecommerce Website Builder/Online Store

Connect your web store to eBay, Amazon Marketplace and more

Quality store templates

Impressive on the integration front

Above average prices

1&1 IONOS eCommerce Website Builder/Online Store is a powerful tool which combines simple template-based web store design with professional features and functionality.

High quality design templates help you get up to speed quickly. There aren’t many, but they look good, and can easily be customized to suit your needs.

1&1 IONOS’s baseline account is a little underpowered, considering its price – $20 (£20 for UK page) a month (the first three months are free though). You get support for up to 5000 items and there’s a free domain, an SSL certificate thrown in, and some basic SEO.

The range improves significantly with the next plan priced at $25 (£25 for UK) a month. This adds more product support (up to 10000), advanced SEO, improvement to shipping (scheduled pickup and real-time shipment tracking) and some additional extras like Instagram store.

The highest plan takes your store to the next level by increasing the product support up to 1 million and allows you to sell on eBay and Amazon Marketplace along with additional improvements. It’s an unusual and welcome extra, but the price is relatively high at $45 (£50 for UK page) a month.

Explore effective strategies for boosting online sales with our guide on Online Product Sales Strategies, optimizing your digital storefront for maximum profitability.

5. Liquid Web

Run the busiest of web stores on this powerful platform

Fast and reliable platform

Powerful, professional web store

Supports physical, digital and virtual products

Starter e-commerce hosting plans can do a lot for a very low price, but you’ll often pay in terms of service quality. Websites based on shared hosting may be slow, or fail entirely, and support is often limited. This might not matter for tiny web stores, but if you’re running a big business, it could be a major issue.

Liquid Web’s hosted WooCommerce plans are far more expensive (higher-performance plans, specifically), with prices starting at $299 (or £230) a month, but it’s easy to see why: they trample all over the underpowered baseline efforts of the competition.

There are also plans for new stores/beginners with prices starting at $19 a month. These aren’t as powerful, but they are worth checking out if you need a more “lightweight” option.

Wide product support covers physical goods, digital downloads, virtual products (like online courses), for instance. There are no limits on the number of products you can sell, and you have many powerful ways to present them.

The site doesn’t just allow customers to choose product variations from a list, for example (color, size, design) – you can show them photos which match their selections.

Store management tools are just as flexible. You can define your own custom order statuses and workflows, automatically offer customers related products, set promotions, create coupons, accept product reviews, manage inventory and more.

Professional design features include hundreds of responsive themes and a drag-and-drop page builder for editing.

Your site is hosted on scalable containers. These are isolated environments which aren’t shared with other users, improving reliability. Even better, they don’t limit you to some preset amount of system resources. The platform can detect when you’re busy and dynamically add RAM and CPU cores as required.

Premium touches include performance testing and a staging area to test site features before going live. Jilt’s abandoned shopping cart recovery may help you regain lost customers, and support for Glew’s analytics will deliver valuable information about your customers and orders.

For busy stores, perhaps most important of all is Liquid Web’s excellent support. The company isn’t just available 24/7/365 to respond to problems: it monitors stores, often detecting and fixing hosting-related issues before you even realize anything is wrong.

Put it all together and this is one very impressive range, with more than enough power to run the busiest of web stores. Go take a look.

• Liquid Web Managed WooCommerce Hosting for US$28.08 per month

Volusion

Rounding out our trio of hosted ecommerce platform, Volusion is another ecommerce specialist that simplifies design and business operations. The platform features an unlimited number of products and storage from the start, with no transaction fees and online support standard, as well.

Upgraded features include abandoned cart reports and help with graphic design, email marketing setup, and other consultative services to help your business grow.

Discover the essential features that power the best e-commerce sites, ensuring your success with our expert guidance on Top Features for Ecommerce Site Building.

eCommerce Web Hosting Service Sites Comparison

Hosting Provider	Key Features	Payment Gateways	Customer Support	Pricing (Starting at)
Shopify	Dedicated eCommerce platform, easy-to-use interface, themes, templates	Multiple options	24/7 support	$29/month
WooCommerce	Integration with WordPress, plugins, customization options	Multiple options	24/7 support	Varies
BigCommerce	Comprehensive eCommerce solution, themes, SEO features	Multiple options	24/7 support	$29.95/month
Wix	All-in-one website builder, drag-and-drop interface, themes	Multiple options	24/7 support	$23/month
Magento	Open-source, customizable, scalable, extensions	Multiple options	Varies	Varies
Square Online	Integrated platform by Square, user-friendly, basic customization	Multiple options	24/7 support	$12/month

Please note that the information provided in the table is based on general features and pricing, and it’s always advisable to visit the respective hosting providers’ websites for the most up-to-date and accurate details.

The Best eCommerce Webhosting Service Provider

Choosing the best eCommerce web hosting service provider depends on several factors, including your specific needs and requirements. Here are some popular options known for their eCommerce hosting capabilities:

1. Shopify: Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that offers robust web hosting specifically designed for online stores. It provides a user-friendly interface, a wide range of themes, and various tools for managing products, inventory, and payments. Shopify takes care of hosting, security, and performance, allowing you to focus on building and growing your online business.
2. WooCommerce: WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce plugin for WordPress. While it doesn’t provide hosting itself, it can be integrated with various hosting providers. It offers flexibility, scalability, and a large number of plugins and extensions to customize your online store. Popular hosting providers for WooCommerce include Bluehost, SiteGround, and WP Engine.
3. BigCommerce: BigCommerce is a fully hosted eCommerce platform that provides reliable and scalable hosting for online stores. It offers a wide range of features, including customizable themes, built-in SEO tools, multi-channel selling, and advanced analytics. BigCommerce handles security, updates, and performance optimization for your store.
4. Magento: Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform known for its scalability and customization options. While it offers both a hosted version (Magento Commerce) and a self-hosted version (Magento Open Source), the hosted version provides a fully managed hosting solution with dedicated infrastructure and 24/7 support.
5. Volusion: Volusion is a comprehensive eCommerce platform that offers both hosting and website building tools. It provides customizable themes, secure hosting, built-in SEO features, and various integrations. Volusion offers different plans to suit businesses of all sizes.
6. Squarespace: Squarespace is a popular website builder that also offers eCommerce functionality. It provides professionally designed templates, easy-to-use tools, and reliable hosting. While Squarespace may not have as extensive eCommerce features as specialized platforms, it can be a good option for small to medium-sized online stores with simpler requirements.

When selecting an eCommerce web hosting service provider, consider factors such as ease of use, scalability, security, performance, available features, customer support, and pricing. It’s advisable to research and compare different providers based on your specific needs to find the one that best suits your eCommerce business requirements.

The importance of getting the best ecommerce web hosting

Today, e-commerce has become a massively lucrative channel for retailers. However, the quality of the hosting services that many small businesses are using often leaves a lot to be desired. A recent report showed that one in three Britons have abandoned their online transactions because of poor website design and inefficient hosting.

Research from hosting company 1&1’s ‘2011 Digital High Street Audit’ finds worryingly low levels of consumer satisfaction with the small business websites available to them. The risk to firms from providing a bad online experience is clear – 49% of consumers believe that a bad website makes a worse impact than a business having no website at all. This conclusion has led 37% to walk-away from companies completely, in favour of using a competitor. An additional 9% of Britons have found themselves reducing their spend with small companies as a direct result of being deterred by a poor company website.

Oliver Mauss, CEO, 1&1 Internet said: “Research shows that keeping an ugly or badly functioning website online can comprise a risk to sales revenue. Consumers have ever higher expectations, and it is essential that every company website inspires confidence. Businesses that invest carefully in their web experience will see higher levels of customer spend, retention and referral”.

eCommerce WebHosting Service Site Vs Webhosting Plan for eCommerce

A Hybrid Solution for Ecommerce

There are, obviously, also hybrid options that are somewhere in between these two extremes.

Just as the sky is the limit when it comes to the combinations you can create when doing things yourself, it’s identical when you are combining some more robust tools with basic options.

ecommerce applications

Understanding All-in-One E-commerce Platforms

When choosing an all-in-one e-commerce platform, where do you start?

E-Commerce Platform and Web Hosting Security

We have briefly mentioned things like PCI compliance, SSL certificates, and dedicated IP addresses, as well as the need to ensure that your website is secure.

To be sure, the entire scope of e-commerce security is outside the scope of this article, but there are some high-level points we wanted to make.

web hosting coupon

Looking for serious e-commerce hosting?

Liquid Web provides exceptional speed and reliability at affordable prices. Our readers can get special pricing on their plans by using this discount link .

Notable Security Factors

At one time, HTTPS was used only on parts of a website where there were shopping carts or where the payments were handled — the trend nowadays, however, is to use HTTPS (which requires an SSL certificate to function properly) for the entire site.

Payment processing (and building a shopping cart) is difficult and handling credit card (and other payment information) can be perilous, so one way to make this portion easy on yourself is to simply integrate with a third-party provider that offers PCI-compliant solutions.

Set up robust fraud detection, anti-virus, and monitoring tools to actively prevent and manage any threats against your store.

Depending on your level of comfort with implementing such things, you might seek out all-in-one products that can be deployed against your website/e-commerce store easily.

From Techradar.com

e-commerce hosting providers in 2020 Build and run your own web store

1. Wix

2. iPage

3. SiteGround

4. 1&1 eCommerce

5. Liquid Web

Read on for our detailed analysis of each host

• We’ve also compiled a list of the best web hosting services

You might also want to check out our other website hosting buying guides:

• WordPress
• Cloud hosting
• E-commerce
• Dedicated server
• Small business
• Windows
• Managed
• Green
• Business
• Colocation
• Email hosting
• Resellers
• VPS
• Shared
• Cheap
• Website builders
• Best website hosting
• Also check out the best website hosting services

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From Hostingadvice.com

Shopping for the Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business, Enterprise, & More

As shoppers, we often pay no mind to the technical foundation that allows us to experience our favorite stores virtually. We expect to be able to browse shoe selections without stepping foot in a store; we’ve grown accustomed to scoping out gifts for mom, selecting her favorite color, and letting PayPal handle the rest.

For some people, online shopping is embedded in our everyday lives. For store owners, taking a business online can unlock new revenue opportunities and expand brand reach — but they need ecommerce hosting to do that.

Payment processing, shipping, and order tracking can be rather intimidating, but the best ecommerce hosting partners connect you with all the tools you’ll need to succeed.

Here, we’ll cover the top ecommerce hosts and how they empower entrepreneurs to reach customers — whether they’re on their couch or a continent away.

Most Popular Ecommerce Platforms

You don’t have to be a web hosting savant to have heard some of the foremost names in ecommerce hosting. Let’s see how some of the web’s most popular brand names in online store building stack up in our experts’ eyes.

Best Ecommerce Hosting Overall

The results are in: After reviewing the best ecommerce services on the web, our experts have whittled the list down to the crème de la crème of ecommerce hosts. Hands down, the best hosts for the job complement low-cost service with ecommerce-ready functionality.

The ecommerce hosts we love provide one-click installations for popular online store building software like Magento or PrestaShop. They throw in free paid advertising credits, and they’re available 24/7 to help you grow your online business.

Best Ecommerce Solutions for Small Business

Small- to medium-sized business owners have many financial, logistical, and staffing considerations in mind when evaluating potential web hosts for their business. Keeping cost and maintenance requirements for their customers top of mind, iPage provides the best value for small businesses to build, customize, and grow an online presence.

Best Ecommerce Software for Enterprise

For business-class hardware, look no further than InMotion Hosting. With SSD-powered dedicated and virtual private servers, InMotion Hosting packs power and performance into hosting plans at a price that will align with your growing business’s goals. What’s more, the company’s team is heavily invested in network monitoring and building out security features.

Best Ecommerce Website Builders

Once again, we’ve saved the website builder fun for last! We paid special attention to the site design and customization features of our favorite hosts’ ecommerce offerings. Several hosts deserve special recognition for making robust, intuitive site builders a standard in their plans.

Leading the charge, iPage packages a custom site builder in all of its hosting plans, so customers can point and click to update and customize their online store sans coding. Meanwhile, A2 Hosting enables users to quickly build an online store equipped for sales. Customers can market and optimize sites for success with more than 80 software options.

Last, but most certainly not least, the InMotion Hosting team custom-built an incredible site builder that sits atop WordPress. The BoldGrid site builder was so well received, BoldGrid became its own brand and now partners with other hosting providers to evangelize the standards for intuitive site building with WordPress.

Ready for Sales? Read Our Ecommerce Web Hosting Reviews to Get Started

By now, you should feel much more prepared to pull the trigger on an ecommerce hosting plan after skimming through our reviews and extra information. Whether you’re a consumer or an entrepreneur, learning about the technology powering your ecommerce store can help build more effective stores and experiences. Now go out and find the deals!

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