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Almost half of Canadian small businesses have an e-commerce website, and together they ring up $1.5 billion in sales a year. If you're not one of them, you'd better get started now. "It'll take three years to get your website working for you," says Andrew Patricio, co-owner of BizLaunch.ca, a small-business training company based in Toronto. That's three years of educating yourself (it's not a bad idea to take a course or workshop), working with a web designer and adjusting your site. Here are the basics for getting customers onto your site and closing the sale.

Hire a designer "Find a vendor you can share your vision with," says Ron Heyde, account director of e-commerce at Graphically Speaking, a design firm in Vancouver. The market is thick with designers, so do your due diligence. Get references and spend some time on sites they've worked on. Look for a company with a good track record that will stick around until your site is up and running.

Look reliable "Trust is a big thing," says Patricio. "Most of us are still a bit wary of buying online." Customers trust sites that look slick and clean, and are easy to navigate. Prominently display a phone number users can call in case something goes wrong. Customer testimonials, logos from your partners, company history, the address and even a picture of your bricks-and-mortar office will assure buyers you're for real and won't abscond with their credit card number.

Give details No one wants to buy hardware, snowboarding equipment or shoes without knowing every possible detail about the product and getting a look at it. Professionally shot pictures are a must, as are tons of specs.

Make it easy Let your customers fill their shopping carts and check out in as few clicks as possible. Too many clicks and they'll bail-either their patience will expire or they'll think you don't know what you're doing.

Choose the best payment method According to Heyde, you'll save money and maintain customer trust by doing manual credit card transactions. Instead of another company processing the order in real time (typically charging you a monthly fee plus a percentage of sales to do so), have each order e-mailed to you, so a staff member can process the credit card and set up shipping.

Get found Make friends with search engines, so shoppers can actually find you. Priming your website so that it ranks high up on Google, Yahoo and MSN is called search-engine optimization. It can take months to nail down the right keywords, so get started well before you unveil your site. Promote your URL to customers and in all your ads. Then, get creative: Patricio suggests using Facebook, Craigslist and other free sites to promote your products and link back to your site.

Keep tweaking Use Google Analytics or a similar program to track your e-commerce shoppers-where they come from and how long they stay. Your online customers could be quite different from your bricks-and-mortar ones, so you may find yourself updating Web content and optimization keywords as you go.

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Search-engine optimization is a bit of an art, so it might be wise to hire a professional to get you started. To find the best sites on the Web, Google and other search engines use complex algorithms to decide where a website will rank. These algorithms take into account three things: keywords-say, "Canadian designer" or "online poker"-embedded in the text, headings and code of your site; meaningful content that actually relates to those keywords; and links to your URL from other legitimate websites. You need to hit on all three to get a good search-engine ranking. "The intent is to have your website found in the top three to five results," says Ted Thrasher, whose company, Toronto Web Services, charges $6,000 for its one-year search-engine optimization program. "If you're not that high up, you're not going to get business."

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