Your Business Online: Ecommerce
If you are selling products through your website, then you will need some sort of ecommerce functionality.
It is crucial that you offer people the opportunity to fulfil a purchase end-to-end online if you want your site to be successful. Whilst ten years ago and perhaps even five years ago you could just about get away with offering simply telephone or even postal fulfilment of orders, you will lose the majority of potential custom now if you don't accept end-to-end card payments online through your site.
The first consideration you need to think about is how detailed and sophisticated your ecommerce requirements are. This needs very careful planning as many people forget key elements when writing their site specification and then add it in as an extra requirement during build. This can make build trickier as some elements need to be planned in the system build right from the start, and of course can add cost.
The simplest of all ecommerce systems is the sale of fixed price items with no shipping requirements - for instance ebooks or electronically sent information. Often this will require no more than signing up for a Paypal or Nochex account (or other payment taking system) and then using the very simple tools within to create 'buy now' buttons that you copy and paste the code for onto your pages.
This will suffice if you are only selling a small amount of items and customers are only likely to purchase one item at once. The fulfilment by default would then simply be you receive an email confirming purchase and then manually dispatch the item to the customer.
You can even use this method for simple purchases and automate the process; there are many systems out there that will manage the above process for you end to end and on receipt of payment will direct the customer to a specific website address where they can download the product in question. Or you can choose to integrate for instance with Paypal IPN if you want to write your own automated processing and logging of orders.
More Complex Requirements
A large number of business sites that require ecommerce will need a more sophisticated solution. Specifically, a shopping cart will be required where customers can specify which item(s) they want, how many of each, and any other possible requirements such as colour, size and so on for clothing.
You will need to plan in detail exactly what you will need the shopping cart to do. For instance will there be variable shipping prices? Will this be based on number of items, weight of items, size of items or a combination? This all needs to be written in your requirements spec and planned accordingly.
Because often we don't think of a piece of functionality we require until build has started, it is very wise to visit a competitors site or similar site that has an existing ecommerce facility. Slowly go through the process end to end to see what choice you have - roughly speaking each choice point relates to a piece of functionality you will require in your ecommerce system. For instance if the competitors ecommerce site lets you choose whether prices are displayed in pounds, euros or dollars and you want the same, then you need to add this to your requirements document... if you don't, it won't be built, and it's usually harder to add things to an ecommerce application than integrate them from the off.
Once you have mapped out everything your shopping cart needs to do comes the most important part in the sense it is how the money is earned - what does the shopping cart do with those details? Usually this will be handing off to a payment handler such as Worldpay, to process all the payments for you. Or you may decide to use a merchant service and a combination of, say, Protx and Barclaycard Merchant Services.
This choice is really down to you, your budget, how robust a solution you require and so forth, but do take the time to research and understand the different solutions and the costs and pros and cons of each. Monthly standing charges for the service and the percentage of each payment taken varies greatly, so do detailed research to find the best cost/benefits ratio for you.
Once all your ecommerce requirements are planned, it's time to consider how you wish to update your website.
This guide to building a business ecommerce site is by Clarity Media Ltd
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
Quick Links
Researching the opportunity... Site strategy... Site structure... Interactivity... Ecommerce... Future proofing and updating... Creating content... Choosing images... Site build... Launch... Measuring success... Building traffic: free methods... Building traffic: paid methods... Onwards and upwards
Home page: building a business website guide
