If you are planning on joining the thousands of other people who make a good living selling products online, there is much to learn. As you would expect with any online business, IT services make up a great deal of your business practices and with that in mind, here are some essential IT services that you should outsource to a local IT support provider.
• Web Design, Hosting & Administration – Of course, your shopping cart website must be designed, constructed, hosted and administered, which can be handled by a single provider. Take your time over website design, as this will be the foundation of your branding and there are several web platforms suitable for e-commerce, including Magento.
• Payment Gateways – Of course, the more payment options you offer your customers, the better; you should set up credit card payment, direct bank transfer, PayPal and Bitcoin, all of which can be added to your list of payment options.
• Cyber Security – Of course, any website that accepts financial transactions must be secure, which is achieved by acquiring a valid SSL Certificate; something your local IT support in Fresno provider can handle. Can a user know whether a website is secure? The answer is yes; a secure site is denoted with an ‘s’, as in ‘https’, the prefix of the URL, or it might have a small padlock icon, which means the same thing. The online consumer won’t give their credit card information to an unsecure site, so you need to make sure your e-commerce website has a valid SSL Certificate, which will put your customers at ease, knowing the site is protected.
• SEO – Search engine optimization is critical for every e-commerce store, as Google is the number one search engine that the online consumer uses to source products. If your shopping cart website is optimized for Google searches, this will drive traffic to the platform and that should lead to higher sales. Talk to a leading SEO agency about site optimization and see what they can do for you. Here are a few money-saving ideas for small businesses, which might prove to be useful.
• Cloud Services – If you migrate all your business data onto a secure cloud network, there are many advantages; all your employees can access essential data from any location, plus you have 24/7 cyber-security from the IT support provider. When the time comes for your accountant to do your tax returns, they can easily access the files they need without bothering you, which saves the accountant time and that saves you money. There are permissions hierarchies to allow authorized access, enabling you to control who has access to what data.
While you are still in the planning stages of setting up your business, talk to a local IT support provider as they will be able to assist you in many ways, as this article explains. Click here for US government information about setting up a business, which every entrepreneur should read.
