Small business website design is one of the keys to successfully bringing your company online. Today we’ll examine one of the most crucial parts of your website: the ordering processing.

Ideally you will already be getting lots of traffic to your website. After all, it’s impossible to sell one of your products if no one is coming by to look at what you’ve got to offer. That’s a topic for another day so let’s just assume you’ve already mastered all the basic internet marketing techniques that bring visitors to your website.

After a visitor pokes around your website a bit, ideally they will decide to place an order. How easy or hard you make this will determine the amount of profits you can expect from your ecommerce business. This is a particularly important piece of the small business website design equation which requires you to answer the following questions:

* How will a customer place an order?

You will need to have detailed descriptions of your offerings as well as a shopping cart set up on your website that allows a visitor to customize their order and then pay for all items at once – and do so completely online. It doesn’t do any good to show the items you have for sale but make a customer pick up the phone to place an order.

* What type of payments will you accept?

You will need a way to take credit card payments online, along with an SSL certificate to assure customers that their financial information is safe. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you can get away without the ability to process credit card payments; if not it will cost you lots of money and sales.

* What if the customer encounters a problem during the checkout process?

Who can they contact immediately and how will they do so? As your business grows you may want to look into providing a virtual customer service rep to interact with the customer online, while he or she is placing their order. If that’s out of the question for now, be sure you clearly state the hours your customer service department (which may consist solely of you!) is available.

* How will you inform customers that their order is in process?

An automatic email message is an easy, effective way to interact with them and give them a link to check on the status of their orders. This function is probably already integrated into your shopping cart software and all you have to do is set it up with the proper verbiage and variables.

It’s not enough to simply create a site and expect it to make you money; good small business website design that addresses all the needs of a customer making an online purchase is essential. Take care of the basics, throw in a bit of extras to make it super easy, and you’ve got a recipe for success!