ECommerce

Start with good foundations

To build a successful business you need firm foundations. A good place to start is to ask yourself the following questions:

“What are my primary goals in life?”   Free time? Travel? Becoming an expert?

“Where do I see my company in ten years time?”   What size company will it be? What will it be doing? What role will you be playing?

“What exactly am I selling?”   All widgets are the same. Are you selling hope? Status? Reliability?

“Who are my potential customers?”   If you don’t know who your customers are you can’t sell to them. What values do they have? What pressures are they under? What sort of people are they?

“What is my business model? ”   A business model is a means of extracting value (not always money) from a relationship. A business model is a dance between you and your customers, giving a little here, taking a little there. Will you be upselling, cross-selling, using loyalty cards, loss-leaders, affiliates?

“What is my business strategy?”   Your business has to chart choppy waters. What potential dangers do you see? Will you have to market your products in new ways, or create new markets? Do you plan on outwitting your competitors or cooperating with them? Do you have backup plans?

“How will my website help my customers? ”   Your customers are all different. Some may be doing research, some might want to buy NOW, some might want to interact with other people, some might simply want an anonymous resource they can utilise. Your site has to deliver what they want or your customers will be GONE.

“How will my website help my business?”   A website has to work for you. And to make it work you need to know what you want from it. Is it going to deliver leads? Are you going to make direct sales? Is it helping customers research offline purchases ? Is it a branding opportunity?

Start Small, Think Big!

Theoretically, one of the simplest ways to start selling on the internet is to use Ebay, where you can test the waters for your product or even branch out temporarily into an Ebay store. However, read around to decide whether or not Ebay is right for you. The Ebay mindset has been pretty appalling in the past, meaning that many small businesses should think twice, three times, even four times before venturing there. That said, there are many highly successful businesses on Ebay.

Alternatively, Yahoo! Merchant Stores offers a relatively cheap way of creating a ‘proper’ e-commerce site with its own domain name. However, to make such a site look professional you still need to employ a designer (since the templates are simplistic and you need some design skills). Furthermore to accept payments you still need to jump through all the hoops of applying for a Merchant Account.

Amazon also offers WebStores, similar to Yahoo! Merchant Stores. Both Amazon’s and Yahoo’s packages are relatively simple to understand, easy to set up and manage and provide low-cost, low-risk means of testing your business model, often with excellent support and information – but are essentially transitional websites limited by the resources and terms and conditions of the host provider.

At some stage you’ll probably want to put your e-commerce site on a more professional footing.

Choosing a Shopping Cart

When choosing a shopping cart you should look for a cart that’s easy to use and administer and that ideally blends invisibly into an existing site and costs a one-time fee.

Shopping carts need (among other things) shipping charges on category pages, clean links (no javascript), ‘clean’ urls (simple and user-friendly), cross-linking capabilities (when you select an item you notice a link to a complementary item), the ability to change the design in different sections of the cart, unique title tags (for Search Engines) and an easy to use Admin area.

When you customise your cart you should ensure that you have easy navigation, fast-loading thumbnail images, shipping information and costs BEFORE you get to the checkout, credibility (contact information, privacy policy, a good looking design, testimonials, warranties), alternative payment methods (the ability to phone through a credit card order), detailed descriptions (concise and emotionally appealling copy), no distractions (piped music, talking avatars, flashing banners, off-site links), a help page, friendly error messages, and easy to understand weights/measures/phone numbers.

Shopping Cart Hell

If you have your own website there are many different shopping carts available, but they broadly fall into two categories:

Open Source carts (such as Zen or OSCommerce) are free and on your server (you look after them) and are built by many different programmers contributing their time voluntarily. However, there are two main drawbacks to Open Source carts -

• Open Source shopping carts are currently driven by the passion of programmers and are thus often designed from the programmers’ point of view rather than from the users’, resulting in technically brilliant but ridiculously over-complicated software.
• Major updates to Open Source carts can take years once the original passion behind a project has disappeared.

Commercial carts pay the mortgages of the designers and there’s therefore an incentive to constantly improve them. The downside is that many companies make their money from recurring monthly fees, usually justified by unnecessary bells and whistles. Or they host your cart on their servers (they look after the shopping cart for you) meaning that you’re a hostage to changes in their policies or pricing.

At the moment there are hardly any good quality, affordable shopping carts around for the small business on a budget. Most carts tend to be complex to look at (read ‘confused and messy’), difficult to administer and don’t integrate easily into existing sites.

The only cart I currently recommend is ecommercetemplates, which slots into your existing site and is hosted on your own servers. It’s far from ideal (it looks like every other boxy, programmer ‘designed’ cart out there and has limited layout options) but it’s solidly written and very well supported.

There are currently no worthwhile ecommerce plugins that integrate neatly with WordPress, as the comments in this article (and my own experience) make clear. It is, however, possible to have a blog that links to an ecommerce site.

Credit = credibility

To receive credit card payment from a customer on your own website smaller companies can use services such as Paypal (NOT recommended for goods as opposed to services), 2checkout.com or Google Checkout. Google Checkout is now becoming as bad as PayPal as described at Squidoo, Slash7 and on the Google Forums.

A cheaper and more flexible option for established companies is a Merchant Account.

A Merchant Account will have many hidden charges – annual fee, batch fee, AVS fee, encryption fee, chargeback fee, monthly minimum fee, cancellation fee (all on top of the up-front application/set-up fee, discount rate, transaction rate, debit fee, statement fee and customer service fee) so it pays to check around. On the whole a low-volume business would probably be best advised to avoid fixed-monthly costs and to go for variable but higher-rate transaction charges.

Paypal …

If you choose to use Pay Pal you should be aware that when things go well they go really well but when they go badly (and if you’re a professional seller eventually they will go badly) you can find yourself in deep trouble. Where a fraudulent chargeback arises (a customer receiving your goods but claiming not to have done so and then demanding their money back) Pay Pal can help themselves to money from your bank account and freeze your Pay Pal account. You may find Pay Pal customer support less than helpful. Here’s a YouTube video from October 2006 that explains the PayPal mindset succinctly, and you can read a lot of other interesting comments about this company here .

Here’s a credible forum devoted to payment processing options.

You Don’t Need to be A Genius to start a business …

There’s a huge amount to get right when starting off in E-commerce, but none of it is rocket science.

‘All’ it takes is effort, passion, luck, an eye for an opportunity and playing to your strengths …