Why sell your products online? Are forecast growth rates of 300% or 400% over the next few years good enough reasons to start thinking about e-commerce? In Australia, where I am writing from, the level of consumer confidence has been greatly enhanced by directions taken by the major banks. The level of demand for Web sites with order processing, payment processing or other forms of e-commerce functionality has reached great heights. From florist and greengrocers to multinationals and government departments – it’s hard to imagine any business or organisation that will not benefit from using e-commerce.
August 15, 1999

Why DIY?

There are many situations when it’s simply not practical or viable to contract out the design of your e-commerce site. The major barriers are usually cost of implementation and issues involving maintenance of your e-commerce site. For example, selling computer hardware requires prices to be updated at least once a day. To ask an external contractor to take up this task would be a logistical nightmare and extremely expensive exercise.

The great news for businesses is that there are viable do-it-yourself alternatives at hand. Most of these are cost effective and require little technical expertise. You (or a member of your staff) will require minimal (if any) knowledge of HTML, graphic design and computing skills. With the smartest tools around using today’s latest technology, this is all you’ll need to build and maintain all but the most sophisticated e-commerce site.

What Are the Options?

There are numerous ways to present your products or services online in a sellable manner – usually in a catalogue format. If you are a small to medium sized enterprise (SME) then you probably won’t want to spend any more than $10 000 on software and design. You’ll also want a solution that is quick to implement and easy to maintain as well. The majority of the solutions will fall into the following two categories:

Off-the-shelf Storefront Software

Off-the-shelf solutions offer a diverse range of options ranging in price from several hundred to many tens of thousands. They will require installation of the software onto a server and you will also need to find hosting for this server. They usually require some time to learn, as they are usually very comprehensive to the point where some of them can become overly complicated. However, they will do just about everything you want an e-commerce site to do. Depending on your level of programming experience, some of these packages will allow you to use your own scripts to give the whole presentation that extra jazz.

Web-based Store Builders

Web-based solutions are services offered on various Web sites allowing you to build your e-commerce site using only your Web browser. There is no software to buy or install. The entire process of building your online store in this way can usually be done with no (or very little) knowledge of HTML or database programming. Pricing is usually charged monthly based on the number of items that you are offering. This can range from a "freebie" for few items to several hundred per month for large stores with the full "bells and whistle". An added bonus for these Web-based store builders is that you don’t have to worry about hosting.

This article concentrates on Web-based store builders. They are an exciting blend of technology and marketing. As you will see, some of them can be every bit as comprehensive as more expensive solutions. Some of the latest offerings take advantage of improved Web browser technology to bring such features as WYSIWYG HTML editing.

For more information about off-the-shelf storefront software, e-comm.internet.com/reviews is a good place to start.

Geography

Before you even begin looking through the technical aspects of each store builder, there’s one important aspect of e-commerce that should not be overlooked. e-commerce is still bound by geographical regions. For example, many US based store builders will not cater for businesses outside of the US. In most circumstances, you should select a system that caters for the country you will be selling in.

Domain Names

Anyone familiar with marketing on the Web would tell you that you can’t afford not to have your own Domain Name. Whatever method you use to build your online store be sure that it can cater for your own Domain Name.

Payment

Your online store should be able to cater for any payment method your customers can dream up. When considering payment, there are two issues to consider:- what form of payment you are willing to accept (credit card, cheque, cash, etc), how the payment information will be transmitted to you from your customer (online, post, fax, in person, etc).

The most popular method of payment is for credit card details to be transmitted over the Internet. There are several variations to this method of payment – credit card payments processed in real-time by an authorised bank (or banking network) or manual processing. Real-time credit card processing will incur additional costs but will enhance security and speed up the administration process. The style of credit card processing adopted by your store will be largely dependent on the products and services offered. In general, it will be less critical to have real-time credit card processing if your lead-time before delivery is long (say, more than one week) and you have good administration processes in place. However, it will become increasing important to have real-time credit card processing if your lead-time before delivery is short (in the case of selling perishable goods like fruit and vegetable) or you have a large volume of transactions to process.

It is still early days for e-commerce and many consumers are yet to be convinced that online security is robust and bullet-proof enough for online shopping. Fax and mail order are still necessary. An online store capable of accepting orders without requiring consumers to enter their credit card details is also important. In this case, a staff member from the online store would contact the consumer to confirm the order. Credit card details can be taken over the phone in some cases.

Why all the fuss about payment? The point is that consumers will not spend money on something they think may never turn up at their doors. Giving your customers as many payment options as possible makes good business sense. Make sure the store builder you use have all these options available for maximum flexibility.

Look, Layout & Editing

Templates are very popular when it comes to online store builders. However, you definitely don’t want your online store looking like 100 others. When you get down to building your store, you will undoubtedly want the flexibility to place links, text, graphical images and other objects at different locations. The ability to format pages quickly and easily is also important – preferably with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style of editing. OpenMalls is one such online store builder that utilises this type of editing.

Security

Online security is all-important for consumer confidence. More likely that not, the store builder you select will use SSL (secure socket layer) security. If this is implemented properly, the closed padlock symbol on Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers will be highlighted. This is probably the most important thing you can do to reassure your customers that ordering online is secure and safe. Select an online store builder that implements this automatically. You shouldn’t have to do anything to bring about this action. A page of explanation regarding the security used on your site is also a good idea.

Statistics Reporting

After your store gets up and running, you will probably want to track your sales performance. Many online store builders will allow you to analyse your transactions. Probably the best (and most awarded) store builder in this respect is Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store). You can analyse sales by a number of groups and categories, page views, conversion rate and so on. You can even find out where your visitors came from (the referring URL) and what they were searching for in search engines before arriving at your online store. Truly incredible!

Chee Wong is the Technical Marketing Executive at OpenSearch Pty Ltd - developers of the www.openmalls.com e-commerce suite.