Selling online can be a bit of a minefield at times, with all sorts of things to worry about, not only during the setup and development phase, but in the general operations of your online business. What I’ve tried to do below is provide a bit of a checklist of things to think about when you’re going through the concept phase of expanding (or setting up) your retail business online. It’s been gathered from various sources, not the least of which is five years of questions and bumps in the road experienced as we’ve journeyed with clients towards successful e-commerce websites. It’s by no means a complete list, but my hope is that it smoothes that road out for at least of few of you, and confirms for the rest of you that you really are that organised.

The Concept

The concept of your site is based around your purpose and audience, your products, and the corporate identity of your business. The following are a few things to ask yourself about the basic concept of your site.

• Who are your competitors and what’s it going to take to draw people away from them?
  

  This is a fairly obvious question, but I’m surprised how often I find myself asking potential clients if they’ve considered how they’ll attract customers over their competitors. For example, if you want to create an online classifieds website where people buy and sell a specific type of product, like antique auto-parts, not only will you be competing with other antique auto-parts sellers online, but you’ll also be competing with real antique auto parts stores, and other online classifieds websites.

  Make sure you’re not overlooking any potential competitors, and do your research into those you can identify as successful, or in a similar field.

• Shopping Cart Software
  

  Do you need shopping cart software on your website? The answer, in the vast majority of cases, is yes. A shopping cart is simply a type of ordering system that allows users to indicate a number of different items that they wish to purchase in one transaction. The only type of e-commerce website where you would not have some sort of shopping cart involved would be a site where there is only one product available.

  Keep in mind that you don’t have to call your shopping cart a shopping cart. “Trolley”, “Order”, “Basket”, “Cart”, “Bag”, “Box” and numerous other nouns have been used to describe a shopping-cart type ordering system. Using an alternative to “Shopping Cart” or “Cart” can be a good idea to better match the character of your site, but be careful getting too creative, or your visitors may have no idea what you’re talking about.

The Process

When shopping online, I find that I’m more likely to return to a site that has a simple sales process that instils confidence in me. A shaky process that is overly complex or leaves me wondering what’s happened to my money or the goods I ordered sends me back to Google to find another online option. The points below are directly related to the sales process of your website.

• Credit Card Processing
  

  Finding a reasonably priced, effective and trusted online credit card processing option can be a little tricky. Some options are easy to implement, some are cheap, and some work really well, offering great payment reporting and refund capabilities. To be honest, I haven’t come across an option that does everything well, so you may need to decide what’s more important to your business. If you’re only expecting a small number of orders per week (up to about 30 or so), cheap options like Paypal are ideal. If, however, you are expecting many orders, or your website is your business, you really need to maintain your branding throughout the sales process and give users an extra sense of security by offering your own payment gateway. This still only acts as a front end to your banks credit card processing system, but it has your name all over it, and users never leave your site. Obviously, this option is more expensive, but it does ensure smooth payment process, and will save you some money down the track from third-party payment gateways.

• Returning Customers
  

  Will your website attract repeat business, with customers returning regularly to make more purchases on your site? If so, it may be worth thinking about a membership program. Repeat customers can return to your website, log in to a restricted area and make purchases without having to re-enter their personal and contact details every time. Not only that, but it opens the door for customer-specific recommendations, loyalty programs and direct mail advertising.

  Customer information must be stored for each order on your website anyway, so in most cases, there’ll be a solid base to build on in your database already. This means that costs for a little extra functionality like a customer log-in area are kept fairly low, which, for the sake of your loyal customers, may well be worth it.

The Operation

Once you’re up and running, how are things going to operate? Where will the orders receiving on the website go? Will you receive them by email, or will you collect them in batches from the site itself? The points below will get you thinking about how things will work once your website is online.

• Data Processing
  

  If you already have a stock management system, how will you move information between it and your website? Will the website stand alone, with you being the only link between, or will you attempt to integrate the two, the website interfacing directly with your local system? This can be a tricky area, and one that I suggest you get your web developer involved in fairly early in the process, as it will affect most decisions he’s going to have to make for the rest of the project.

• Images
  

  Images can present a bit of a problem for some website owners. The problem of course, is that websites and high-resolution photographs don’t mix. If you take a photo of one of your products with a modern digital camera, chances are, the image file is going to be somewhere between two and three megabytes, sometimes much higher. This isn’t going to work on a website, as the largest images on a website are usually no more than 80 to 100 kilobytes (KB), sometimes as low as 30KB. Also, most websites have thumbnail images to allow for quick image browsing. There are some options available that will perform these operations for you automatically, but they can add to the initial development costs of your site.

  You also need to think about what restrictions are going to be placed on the creative processing of the images. Your designer may want to see nice, clean images, isolated on a white background. But do you have the skills to mask out the background of your photos in an image processing program like Photoshop? Or can you find someone that can do this for you at an affordable rate? If not, you may need to discuss this with your developer before he/she designs the site.

Conclusion

If I could give you one piece of advice that I knew you were going to take away, it would be this: Commit yourself to learning something before you begin looking into selling online. You cannot operate an online business without knowing something about the internet and the advantages and issues that surround it. Please do some research before you talk to a web developer; don’t sit down in that first meeting and say “I don’t know much about computers…”.

Selling online has many advantages, but it’s like any business, your chances of success increase the more you know about your industry. Don’t go in blind, and I wish you all the best.