E-Commerce: Setting up your own site
From www.entrepreneurstoolkit.org
Thinking about setting up your own e-commerce site? Before you read on, see also E-Commerce: Hosted web solutions
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Advantages
- No listing fees
- You can direct repeat buyers through your site
- You can list your site on Google Shopping, Price comparison sites, Amazon
- You can access customers from the rest of the Net (outside eBay)
Disadvantages
- If you want to cancel your store after, say, six months of operation – you may face loosing some of your upfront investment in your site
- You will be entirely responsible for the transaction – from beginning to end
- Unless the seller is a PayPal customer, or with some other similar payment service, you will be responsibile for losses such as fraud and other non-payments
What you will need to do on your own
- Get a domain name and hosting package from a website host (around $150 per year).
- Either buy a ecommerce package pre-setup (around $500 once off) or get a free package such as os-commerce and have it modified by a website designer and coder.
- Have a webmaster (someone who knows about FTP uploading) to upload your site
- Add your products and customize your store
- Work with an search engine optimization (SEO) expert to get your website ranked higher in Google yahoo and other search engines. As with the real world its all about location location location. Being at the top of Google for your keyword is paramount for a profitable business. (Make note SEO will take 6 to 12 months to work, there are a lot of SEO scammers out there so make sure it’s a large company or a trusted company. And no one can guaranty a top position is Google walk away if they do).
- Make sure to have as many electronic payment options available, from PayPal, to credit card, to Google checkout.
NOTE: According to Volusion, if you sell online and accept credit cards, then you MUST be Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standardcompliant. The deadline to become compliant has passed and it’s not something you can claim ignorance toward. As well, if you are using a hosted solution, your provider must be CISP Certified and appear on Visa’s approved list. If you host your own store, then you must go through the very time consuming and costly process of becoming certified on your own. [2]
Non-PCI/CISP Compliant Merchants Face:
- Class-action lawsuits
- up to $10,000 in monthly fines
- up to $500,000 in fines (per incident)
- Losing the ability to process transactions altogether
Skills needed
Building an online business from scratch requires skills in many different arenas: graphic design, programming, database development, Web design, copywriting , photography, and online marketing to name a few. Even if you have these skills in-house or if you plan on learning them yourself, you might want to consider the following.
Are you choosing to learn a skill that will directly translate into more revenues for your company or are you learning a skill that will let you do cool things on the Internet? Do you want to be an online retailer, or do you want to be a Web developer? The highest and best use of your available time & resources probably isn’t learning the ins and outs of designing an e-commerce website, but taking care of customers, finding new products, and promoting your business.
Checklist of tools needed
You will need the following tools if you are designing your e-commerce site yourself:
- web design software
- image editing software
- illustration software to create graphics
- FTP software for uploading files to your Web site
For the actual selling of products and services you will also need:
- a merchant account - to collect payment via credit card or some other electronic payment options
- Shopping Cart Software (see below) - or some other way for shoppers to enter and keep up with their orders
- software to process the transaction and send information to all of the involved parties (your bank, their bank, etc.)
- a web host with secure servers if you're accepting credit card payment or other personal payment information online - one that supports Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption (see Online secure transactions)
- software (or other process) to keep track of inventory and orders
For keeping track of large numbers of products or services you will list on your e-commerce site you will benefit from having:
- a database to track/store product names, descriptions, pricing, and photos
- a system for establishing product numbers
- a system for inventory management
- technical know-how in incorporating the database into your Web site
Shopping Cart Software
Shopping cart software lets your Web shoppers select the products they want, preview the sale amounts, delete items they change their minds about, and enter in their payment and shipping information. Having a good shopping cart interface is very important for a good e-commerce-enabled Web site. The easier and more intuitive you make it for your shoppers the more sales and the more repeat business you can have.
Hopefully it is obvious that programming such an interface yourself does not make much sense when there are a myriad of off-the-shelf shopping cart programs on the market which have been proven and debugged over time, and offer a lot of features for a reasonable price.
Features to look for: [3]
- simple template- or wizard-based tools to set up the ordering functions the way you want them
- SSL (secure socket layer) capabilities (see Online secure transactions)
- interactivity with online authorization services
- shipping calculators -- some also offer real-time shipping links
- business administration tools for managing the sales cycle
- management tools to manage your store
- merchandising features that let you cross-sell more products
- inventory tracking functions
- product maintenance and categorizing tools
- order reviewing and confirmation tools
- sales tax calculators
- capabilities for selecting various product options
- e-mail order notifications
- help functions
- search functions
- discount functions
- frequent-shopper-point functions
- price variation capabilities based on product option choices
- database importers for the programs you are using to set up your product databases (e.g.. Microsoft Excel, Access, or even ASCII formats)
When looking as shopping cart software solutions here are some things to remember:
- Watch for products or services that take the shopper away from your site.
- Check out the support services and user documentation.
- Visit some sites that are currently using the product and test them out. (Talk to the store owners if possible.)
- If you are designing and building your own Web site, also check on development components for programs like Microsoft FrontPage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, or whatever program you are using to build your site. (Having these specific components makes integrating the shopping cart code with your site much easier.)
- Check on system requirements and platform compatibility -- if your site is being designed on a Macintosh system then it might help to have the shopping cart software compatible.
- Check out the payment services the program is compatible with such as Authorize.net, Cybercash, SurePay, etc.
The actual software packages to consider are too numerous to mention here. Best bet is to start by checking out review sites like Shopping Cart Review.
If you like open source solutions consider checking out osCommerce as well.
Other important considerations
