happy shoppers like good bandwidthA website can be a very useful tool for companies who need a venue to sell their services or products. With a website, a company can easily reach out to new areas of the internet, reaching potential new clients much easier than traditional advertising could accomplish. With eCommerce, every chance for conversion matters, especially speed and convenience.

What Every Business Should Know About Creating An Ecommerce Website:

No matter what type of business you have, your website can showcase your products effectively with a little bit of creativity and designing. There are a few factors, however, that every business should consider when it comes to setting up their eCommerce site, the following is a short list of those factors:

Hosting Space: You need reliable hosting space in order to hold all the data that your site will consist of. Without this hosting space, you would literally have no website to showcase your products.

Bandwidth: Most internet users know this word well, since bandwidth is the backbone of any ecommerce. Why is it important? Bandwidth is the measurement of data transferring for your connection to the internet, and every website on the web has its own bandwidth usage amount. The higher the bandwidth the faster your information will be accessible to you customers. If you have low bandwidth limits on your web host, your site could suffer greatly and your profits would take a big hit as well. Poor bandwidth will not only affect load time, it will impact how many potential customers can actually view your information. Many site owners view bandwidth as a secondary consideration, when it should be a primary one.

Infrastructure: A solid infrastructure is absolutely essential. The platform you choose to run your ecommerce business on will directly impact store management capabilities, controls of onsite optimization, and even how easily you will be able to market your products. Choosing the right eCommerce platform can solve this problem easily, giving you a solid system for managing products, videos, reviews, photo representation, and purchasing ability. An eCommerce system can help any business, big or small, conduct business over the internet to earn profits in real time without making it overly difficult to perform. Using eCommerce solutions like BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento can get your website up and running within hours, allowing your company to start earning profits immediately.

Layout: A website consists of more than just words and pictures on a screen. Having a unique and intuitive layout that will guide your customers to your products is just as important as the infrastructure that runs it.

Out of the list of considerations for setting up your online store, one of the most important and also most undervalued considerations is bandwidth. Make no mistake; underestimating the importance of bandwidth will cost you sales and potentially customers.

How Can Bandwidth Help Your Website Be More Effective?

So, how important is bandwidth when choosing an eCommerce platform? Quite simply, it’s essential. Even if you have the most stable web host, the flashiest website design, and the most detailed information on your products when compared to other sites, you will still need a strong bandwidth allocation as the backbone to your website. Bandwidth problems can and will create big problems for your online business ranging from angry and irritated customers to loss of sales.

It’s Not a Problem, Until It’s a Problem
I’ve dealt with several online businesses seeking help to migrate their store to a new platform due to bandwidth issues. All of these stores started on a platform that seemed ideal in the beginning, and to be fair, worked ideally until the stores became a little more popular. All it takes is the start of a loyal customer base and then any news feature or sales promotion can lead to a larger than average site usage. Unfortunately, if the server’s bandwidth isn’t capable of handling the capacity the site is going to go down. You can imagine how frustrating this can be to hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of customers who were anxiously waiting to get their hands on that new release. I can tell you one thing; it’s certainly motivation to find a better hosting solution.

BigCommerce, one of the largest and fastest growing eCommerce platforms, felt some growing pains over the past few years and was in-fact motivated to make some changes due to customer feedback. Customers were constantly going over on bandwidth, which resulted in additional fees, store problems and unhappy customers. Overall, the BigCommerce platform is definitely one of the best, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement and improve they did. BigCommerce now features unlimited products and bandwidth for all hosting plans. Not only do they offer unlimited bandwidth, they offer high volume bandwidth options for stores that require the extra capacity.

Most companies that host websites will limit their hosting plans each month, allowing a set amount of bandwidth usage for each customer on that server. This bandwidth amount will be spread out between your visitors, as each one visits, loads your site, and conducts their business with you. Once it runs out, however, you could be spending extra fees for anyone else who visits after the bandwidth limit is reached. Also, the more bandwidth that is used each day as people visit you, the slower your website can perform. This stress can affect other hosted clients, as well as your own website’s performance, making it important to ensure your hosting package has a sufficient amount of bandwidth for the amount of traffic you are expecting your business to attract.

Having a website can seem like a daunting task for the budding entrepreneur, but spending the time on the front side to really compare platforms and their capabilities will be well worth it. Even larger businesses can benefit from making use of eCommerce software, to help streamline their systems and make their websites more intuitive for their customers and clients to browse. Having a well maintained infrastructure, backed by a sufficient bandwidth, will not only help your company gain the web presence it needs to compete in today’s fast paced marketing world; it will help keep your customers happy and loyal. After-all it’s not all about getting traffic — it’s about getting those visitors to come back for more.