If you're a small business owner and you want to secure a good online presence, it's vital to have a well thought out plan for your website.

 There are plenty of options available, meaning that it's possible to find the features you'll need for just about every business.  However, there are so many choices that it can be difficult to figure out which ones will be worthwhile for you and which ones will just get in the way.

Plenty of web store owners decide to use everything they have available, resulting in a system that's difficult to use and a web page that's hard to navigate.  Avoid this by making the right choices when picking out features for your web shop.  Think ahead, and plan around the way your customer base will use the website, rather than making a more generic site that will be less effective.

Take a good look at your customer base, and think about how your business operates.  If you're a small jewelry studio that does mostly custom work, you'll have different needs when it comes to features than a cake decorating business with multiple outlets.  If you sell a large number of simple things, like baseball cards and accessories, you'll have different requirements than a business that focuses on custom and specialty orders. 

Anticipate purchase volume and type.  If you're carrying inventory of a type that can be purchased using a shopping cart system, and requires little or no discussion with the customer, use automated features to make everything run a lot more smoothly.  This takes the largest number of obstacles out of the way of your potential customer making a purchase.  Most people are looking for a reason not to buy, and the more steps there are in your purchase process, the less likely they are to make that decision.

On the other hand, if each order you complete requires a personal touch, and you're filling orders primarily for custom pieces that need a lot of negotiation, a shopping cart actually adds an extra step.  That's because your customer must contact you anyway.  Instead, make sure you have a detailed contact form that's easy to get to, or make your contact information obvious and simple to find.  Any website for your business has to do a lot more than look good.  It should be one of the most useful tools you have for running your business.

There are plenty of available web shop options and online payment options available from a large number of providers.  Shop around and see what each provider is able to offer you.  Ideally, you should find one that's willing to help you develop a custom solution for your business.  However, if you aren't able to find a provider that will do this in your price range, a reasonable second choice is one with a variety of options that will let you choose the right ones for your business.  Web shop features aren't an are where a one size fits all approach will do the job. 

Some features you might see for a business web shop include software packages that include product and image management, stock information management, the ability to set up discounts as you choose, and delivery charges.  Having a system available to help you manage content from a central point will make it a lot easier to change information across the site, instead of making the same change manually on each page.  No matter what you choose, however, be certain that you have a secure method for processing payments and orders.  Otherwise, you're at risk of losing vital customer information.

If your business is one that operates not only through a webpage, but also has one or more retail outlets in the real world, a central control system for your stock and orders is important.  That way you'll be able to see what orders must be filled and shipped, as well as managing schedules and other jobs.  There are providers that offer specific backend features to allow you to manage all this from one point.

No matter what features you decide to use in your web shop, clean design is a universal requirement.  If customers can't easily navigate your site, you're losing sales.  Be sure that you have a site that will work with almost any browser and monitor.  The best way to make certain of this is to have other people, who aren't familiar with the site you're building or your logic, check it out from different computers.  They'll be able to quickly tell you if there was something they couldn't find, or if certain elements didn't display correctly.  Be sure that anyone can find your ordering and contact information, so you're more likely to make the sale.

Any web site that features a clean design will be able to provide the features visitors need without making them deal with a lot of options they won't use.  That's why careful analysis of the way you and customers will be using your web shop is vital to deciding what to include.  Not sure what's right for you?  Talk to a trusted expert (preferably someone who's had a web store of their own for a while) about what works and what doesn't.  While you can't follow every instruction exactly, since each business is different, people with experience have a lot to offer when it comes to deciding which option is best.  They can tell you what features might help you, and which ones are likely to be in the way.