How to make a great e-commerce web site

There are many ways to put up a great e-commerce web site and one is that you must be ready to take ownership of the website and keep it updated all the time. Do not get into e-commerce unless you are ready to put in the time to keep it updated.
Here are some good suggestions by Moz Blog:

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The navigation at the top needs to do a few things. It's got to help people:

• Understand and know where they are in the site structure, especially if you have a more complex site. In Bellroy's case, they don't really need to highlight anything. You know you're on a wallet page. That's probably in Shop, right? But for Amazon, this is critically important. For Best Buy, this is hugely important. Even for places like Samsung and Apple, critical to understand where I am in the site structure.
• I want to know something about the brand itself. So if this is the first time that someone is visiting the website, which is very often the case with ecommerce pages, they're often entry points for the first exposure that you have to a brand. Let's recall, from what we know about conversion rate optimization, it is uncommon, unusual for someone to convert on their first visit to a brand or a website's page, but you can make a great first impression, and part of that is what your top navigation needs to do. So it should help people identify with the brand, get a sense for the style and the details of who you are.
• You need to know where, broadly, you can go in the website. Where can I explore from here? If this is my first visit or if this is my second visit and I'm trying to learn a little bit more about the company, I want to be able to easily get to places like About, or I want to be able to easily learn more about their products or what they do, learn more about the potential solutions, learn more about their collections and what other things they offer me.
• I also, especially for ecommerce repeat visitors and for folks who are buying more than one thing, I want to have this simple navigation around Cart. I don't, in fact, love how Bellroy minimizes this, but you want to make sure that the Search bar is there as well. Search is actually a function. About 10% to 12% of visitors on average to ecommerce pages will use Search as their primary navigation function. So if you make that really subtle or hard to find or difficult to use, the Search feature can really limit the impact that you can have with that group.
• I want that info about the shopping process that comes from having the Cart. In Bellroy's case, I love what they do. They actually put "Free shipping in the United States" in their nav on every page, which I think, clearly for them, it must be one of the key questions that they get all the time. I have no doubt that they've done some A/B testing and optimization to make sure, "Hey, you know what? Let's just put it in front of everyone because it doesn't hurt and it helps to improve our conversion rates."

Remember that e-commerce is there to sell and make it easier to sell a product. Make your website easy yet comprehensive.

More to come...