E-Commerce Store- Austin’s Photography

In my E-Commerce course, I had an assignment to create a functional e-commerce store for a real or fictional business. I decided to build a photography e-commerce store.

During this project, I had many tasks including:

  • Setting up a domain
  • Creating pages for the store
  • Researching plugins
  • Adding products, prices, and descriptions
  • Setting up shipping, sales tax, and payment gateway
  • Writing a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and refund and return policy pages

For this business, I created both physical and digital products. I added printed products that can be shipped and digital products that can be downloaded.

Product Pages

On each product page, I included:

  • Mockup photos
  • Descriptions
  • Prices
  • SKU
  • Size and color options
  • Dimensions

Digital Product
Physical Product

Terms and Conditions

This page contains the rules and regulations for using the site, the definition of terms, and the user’s rights and acknowledgment.

The main topics that are discussed on this page include the following:

  • User Accounts
  • Copyright Policy
  • Placing Orders
  • Intellectual Property
  • Feedback
  • External Links
  • EU & US Legal Compliance
  • Limitation of Liability

Refund and Return Policy

This policy discussed the following:

  • Overview
  • Exchanges
  • Shipping Returns
  • Product Policies

Privacy Policy

The main topics that are discussed in the policy:

  • Collection of Personal Information
  • Automatic Data Collection
  • Payment Information
  • GDPR
  • Cookies
  • Minor Age Policy
  • Privacy Rights of California Residents
  • Limitations
  • Policy Changes

The policy page will be updated regularly and has clearly defined terminology

Promotion Strategies

5 promotion tactics I used to promote the store:

1. Optimize for SEO

This will create a better user experience, and reach the target audience and prospective customers

2. Give customers and search engines helpful product descriptions

Clear descriptions are important to help customers understand the products and for search engines to properly rank the page to increase SEO.

3. Create interesting, useful content

It’s important that your products serve a purpose and benefit the customer or prospective customer. Unique, helpful content can extend reach to new market niches and make it easy to repurpose content.

4. Boost the organic social presence

A well-rounded social presence will increase awareness and conversions. Social media can help customers understand the purpose of the product and promote sales.

5. Sell products on a third-party site

Selling products on a third-party site like Amazon or Etsy will increase reach and sales. This will customers more ways to purchase from you.

Reflection

Overall, I’m happy with the project and the end result. I enjoyed building an e-commerce site from scratch and exploring the different plugins and resources available to me on WordPress. If I had more time, I would’ve spent more time on the page’s design, including colors and text. Additionally, I would add more products and an About page. Because this was a school assignment, I would’ve liked to run a “test payment” to see how the process went, but I did have a payment gateway set up to take payments.