Anyone who has an idea for an online business, or at least one with an online component, doesn't have long before they come across an important question. What's the best way to create an ecommerce website? The answer is fairly straightforward, but in order for it to have credibility, we need to first look at what eCommerce entails in order to understand why the answer is correct.

In other words, the website should be able to sell its product or service in the same way a normal, offline business does. For example, if the product has several attributes that customers must choose from (say t-shirt size, color and style), then the website needs to have the correct functionality in place to facilitate these choices.

By the same token, if the charges for a product or service are recurring then the payment capture facilities have to handle this elegantly and efficiently too. Of course, online stores can also sell digital goods via download which is something traditional busineses tend not to do, and eCommerce stores also need to cater for this possibility.

It should be fairly apparent that a good eCommerce site should be flexible and highly configurable in order to cater for the wide variety of products and transactions that modern commerce utilizes. Even if your intent is to sell tins of cookies and nothing else, you'll be at a serious disadvantage if you decide to expand operations and don't have a site that is flexible enough to update with ease.

Having a flexible and adaptable eCommerce platform is wasted if the website itself is not robust and reliable. If your site is down every other day then don't expect customers to remain loyal. Reliability is not the sole domain of the website itself. The hosting service plays a big role in avoiding downtime. It is critical for eCommerce sites to have a quality hosting service as well as a reliable and well coded web platform.

In addition to being flexible and reliable, an online store needs to be easy to operate. There's no point in selling tonnes of products if the website cannot keep track of them, or doesn't automate shipping and packaging, or allows product that are out of stock to be sold, much to the irritation of customers. Having a full featured administrative interface to help manage and maintain store operations is an absolute necessity. I hear horror stories of how much unnecessary work people do behind the scenes to maintain their store, simply because they are using poor or outdated eCommerce platforms.

I was going to let it go without saying, but I guess many people might be wondering about it. Yes, an eCommerce website also needs to have an attractive and professional interface, which means it should be easy to design with. Most people intuitively understand the importance of presentation because it can help a website meet the expectation of customers and encourage them to purchase.

One of the most important factors to consider is cost. Cost comes in three forms that you need to weigh against each other - namely, time, effort, expense. You might find that avoiding expense leads to time wastage or prevents you from concentrating on the business itself because you are putting to much effort into building the platform. Alternatively, you might waste money by paying for services that could be done with a bit of time and effort on your part.

Finally, the store needs to be SEO enhanced from the ground up. SEO is pretty important in today's search engine dominated market. While there is room for you, as the content producer, to boost your SEO, it can be far more beneficial to have powerful automated SEO features embedded into the design of the site.

With all these requirements to consider it is no wonder that confusion reigns supreme online, but here's the answer:

Take a look at the following website that sells a single product using Drupal and UberCart, Drupal eCommerce Course. The simplicity of this website belies its power and how Drupal and UberCart made it super easy to create. Guess how long it took to set it up (including registering the domain, configuring the web server, designing the interface, adding the content, and so on)?

Four hours, start to finish... enough said.