One of the fastest growing sectors of the web is e-commerce.  With everyone selling things from ebay, to amazon, and their own sites, e-commerce has become a major factor in developing sites on most Content Management Systems, including Joomla!  Here’s some of the top mistakes we notice people making when building an ecommerce site in Joomla!  Have you done some of these, or maybe have some of your own?  Leave them in the comments, we’d love to hear them!

Site Security

Without of a doubt, one of the biggest concerns for users shopping online is security, especially with the recent round of high profile hacking that has occured over the last year.  And, to be honest, they have good reason to be concerned!  With their financial viability, and their wallets on the line, shopping on a secure site is a legitimate concern!  Unfortunately, most webmasters don’t see it that way.  I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve come across that have minimal levels of security, many ignoring established standards like using SSL Certification to protect their users information.  Want a quick way to lose your business?  Get hacked and lose your customers information!  I think site security tops the list of mistakes that e-commerce site owners overlook, in their site.

Search Optimization

It was hard deciding which was a bigger mistake, Site Security of Search Optimization - but Site Security won because of it’s implications for users.  Regardless, one of the things I notice time and again in sites that I come across and sites I work on is the lack of optimization.  This is not exclusive to Joomla!, webmasters on many platforms overlook this, but we’re looking at Joomla! here.  To be honest, e-commerce sites have a certain level of built-in SEO edge.  The fact that each of their products offer them a unique page that can be optimized to benefit their rankings gives them an immediate edge over other sites who have to build each page from scratch!  This one is an easy one to fix, most shopping carts for Joomla! provide very good SEO capabilities for each product page, just use them!

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