Hosting Ecommerce sites is different from hosting a personal or information-based website. Your hosting plan should offer special features that can make your online store a profitable and dependable business resource.

Ecommerce is a rapidly growing industry, which explains the sudden increase in demand for Hosting Ecommerce websites. From small merchants to high-profile businessmen everyone is interested in doing business online and needs a good, high performance Ecommerce Hosting Solution.

While good bandwidth, adequate disk space, multiple email accounts etc are integral features of all Web hosting plans, hosting ecommerce website requires some more special features. If you want to know more about these features, read on.

Special Features of an Ecommerce Hosting Plan

Here’s a list of important features that should be a part of all good and reliable ecommerce hosting packages:

- Shopping Carts – Shopping carts are essential for all ecommerce websites since it allows customers to select different products, store them in their cart and bill them together while checking out. It is a very convenient option that enhances the shopping experience of your customers.

Some the best shopping carts include features such as automatic price calculation, inventory management, sales reports, accepting debit/credit cards and so on. Customers can store as many items as they like, choose quantity and get them billed all at once when they are done shopping.

- Catalogs & Itemized display – An essential ingredient of all good ecommerce sites is itemized display or Product catalogs. When looking for Hosting Ecommerce sites, look for hosts that offer catalog management and can install them for you. This makes your site look more professional, provides a clear picture of the merchandise being offered and makes it simpler for visitors to choose products of their choice.

- Merchant Accounts – If you want to be able to accept payments from credit or debit cards on your site, you will need to set up a merchant accounts. Merchant accounts allow you to accept credit card payments directly from your customers and the money is instantly credited to your bank account. Your Ecommerce Web Host can help you set up a merchant account and install the necessary softwares on your site. 

- Advertising credits – When hosting Ecommerce websites, it is important to build a brand image for your site and increase its popularity. Apart from link exchange, there are several other methods of advertising your site like posting ads on Google and other sites.

While independent advertising can be costly, you can look for web hosts that offer free advertising credits. Most popular ecommerce hosting plans include free credits that can help you save costs on advertising.

- SSL Certificate – SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it is a form of data encryption that protects your business transactions against hackers, frauds and other risks. When you sell merchandise online, a lot of your customer’s financial information is stored on your site such as their credit card numbers, billing address etc.

SSL software encrypts such confidential information and guarantees a safe and secure shopping experience for your clients/customers. SSL protected sites display an ‘https:’ before the website URL and are considered safe for online transactions.

Along with all the above features, Redundancy and reliability are the two most important things to look for while hosting ecommerce websites. A good Ecommerce web host will not only provide all the essential features but will also help you set up your online store from start to finish.