Special Resource Section: 10 Best Practices for Choosing the Right E-Commerce Platform Provider

2. Make sure your provider offers support for search engine optimization initiatives. Let's face it, most of today's shoppers use search engines to quickly find the sites that sell the products they need. With this in mind, quiz the providers you're interested in about their SEO strategy. You're likely to hear that your brand will shoot to the top of the organic rankings. But don't just take their word for it. Check Google's PageRank on some of their clients' sites. If the ranking isn't at least a three or four, you'll probably want to look elsewhere. Another helpful exercise is to pick a few customers of the providers you're considering and search for them on Google and Yahoo. Take note of where those customers show up.