Building a website for allowing online transactions over the Internet requires meticulos planning and knowledge. I have helped a number of businesses over the years to help them gain a major push in the Internet market. A few guidelines before setting up an online store:

• Research the market for how websites work, and contact a few designers before making your choice.
• Choose a catchy domain name - if you know what keywords your customers will be looking for, try and buy a domain name with the keyword as a part of the name. Make sensible choices as to the domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .net) - a rule of thumb, if you are a UK based business and primarily want to target UK traffic, choose a .co.uk domain name
• Hosting your domain - again a .co.uk domain should be hosted within the UK, choose a provider who can offer robust email handling capabilities. You do not want your order emails lost in SPAM.
• Get your site professionally designed. I know a number of businesses who have tried designing their sites themselves but it is always better to watch a pro do the work first. As a web designer and developer, I make it my business to know how the Internet industry works.
• If you do not have a web presence yet, choose a text based site as opposed to Flash. Flash is fantastic but getting it on search engines is probably not the easiest thing to do.
• Look into payment options, a few of them include Protx, Paypal, Worldpay, Barclays etc. Checkout my resources page for a list of payment providers for the UK market.
• Choose a search engine marketing strategy, maybe a combination of organic SEO and pay per click marketing depending on your budget.