One of the first question from my experience in dealing with businesses that want to start an online shopping store is to define the real business were actually in. I started a an online cigarette store and an online jewelry store and actually found out things I wouldnt have possibly found out if I didnt actually experienced it. Anyways, if you want to start an ecommerce business consider these factors;
Do you have a brick and mortar business already that will go along with the online form of the business? If you have then you may want to start making some (like possibly 20 to 50) of your products online and then keep changing it until you understand the online trend - this ofcourse after you've done marketing on it, cause without marketing, you will never get any traffic to your site. Online marketing your site would be the most sensible way of getting traffic to your site and I can suggest something thats fast and easy traffic generator and that is the SEM (Search engine marketing) via add placements through bidding positions in Googles and Yahoo pay per click section (Adwords and Overture Yahoo search marketing)
Are your products tangible or intangible ? This is important cause intangible (non physical products) distribution online is different to tangible physical products - consider packaging, shipping, weighing hassles. Moreover, If youre in Indonesia, its almost impossible to connect a third party payment processor to your site when selling intangible products. The only way is to make an internet merchant account outside of Indonesia and possibly linking it through verisign and thawte for authentication and encryption technology. If youre selling tangle products consider your self more lucky since you could always integrate your CC payment online through payment processors (2checkout, paysystems) and not having to worry about scripting the connectors and having the hassle of needing to make an internet merchant account. The discount fee is also affordable in payment processors, for example, 2checkout offers a 5% discount and less than 1% charge for every sale that you make online.
Size,Texture and other elements.. If you have tangible products, you may also want to consider how many unique products including variations in size, texture, and other features that you want to offer. Ofcourse you should always weigh each products and measure its dimensions (both packaged and unpackaged) so that you will have data for shipping purposes later on and for customer reference.
Different pricing, Dynamic or HTML static website ..Then I think you will need to determine if different groups of customers will see different pricing on the same items. This is related to whether youre going to offer special promotional pricing, seasonal sales or other forms of temporary pricing or volume discounts maybe?,, rebates? pricing variations. All these confidential pricing variations would almost always means you need to create a dynamic website as oppose to html static site.
Channel distribution .Remeber also that if you already own an offline channel distribution for your product, your product shown on the internet (if you have a high search engine positioning placements on some critical traffic keywords) you may just create an unwanted conflict for your business. I reckon you should make sure you address your pricing strategies to make sure you dont go cutting your distribution channel with an online venture.
Navigation ? I forgot to mention about the website and its navigation. This is one of the most important elements that your customers will remember. Whether or not they can easily navigate through the website to find what theyre looking for will also be a determinant of your online business success. I truely think that the more fun you can make this process the more often your customer is likely to return.
Customer Dialogue to reduce chargebacks and cancellations. When youre business is online, remember the 24/7 component of the business. This means you will be open for business for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. The part where you have to answer questions from customers and assiting customers not to mention if there is a complaint will never stop. You must determine how you will respond to all sorts of customer questions regardless of the medium. Who will answer emails, accept phone calls, faxes snail mails etc. The way to go about solving this to make written policies and procedures for handling customer complaints, or integrate a e-CRM (for instance salesforce.com, Talisma.com, Rightnow.com) or/and a CIM(Liverperson.com, Rightnow.com) system on your site. if you don't care about this part, I gurantee you will get alot of chargebacks, cancellations and returns. More about this later...
Cart.. ?Another important element is order processing. This has to do with the website having a shopping cart and all. (if not a shopping cart then it should be be basket or something in that form)
Shipping expenses and terms and conditions..?, I am sure you will agree with me that none of your customer or anybody shopping online will put up with calculating their shipping cost. So It is important to offer a customer a full itemized list of the cost involved in each sale, with a clear listing of teh currency involved, terms of delivery or performance, and terms and conditions, cancellations.
Credit card payment - think about ways of accepting payments. I mentioned this above on the payment processor part. This is always possible and easy to do.
Fraud checking and Validation, I dont know if you realize this... or you will only be able to realise this if youve actually experienced being a merchant of an online store. What ever happens a merchant is always in the lossing side of a bad transactions. There was a case from my client, where a customer who had actually received a product told the bank to cancel the transaction and the customer didnt ever need to resend back the product thus my client who happens to be the merchant at that time, lost it all on that transaction. This is just one case, there are alot more...Anyways, the merchant looses in any case unless you prevent these kind of things to happen. So implement a really good fraud prevention and checking, both manually and automatically.
Product Availability, when you launch your site I strongly suggest that you offer only those products that are in your immediate inventory.
Back orders preparations. You will also realise that at times there will be times when your products or items that had just been purchased online will be out of stock. So what happens? you will have to notify the customer that this item can be back ordered, or you may have to offer a substitution. Read on other sites or search on 30 days e-commerce, there are rules you will have to follow when doing this, cause if you don't and youre using a payment processor, you may loose your internet merchant account from the payment processor. That is why, did I tell you why I chose cigarettes as a product to sell?.. the reason was at that time, it was all availble everywhere...I had one shop located in front of my house where I use to buy before shipping them.
Do you have a brick and mortar business already that will go along with the online form of the business? If you have then you may want to start making some (like possibly 20 to 50) of your products online and then keep changing it until you understand the online trend - this ofcourse after you've done marketing on it, cause without marketing, you will never get any traffic to your site. Online marketing your site would be the most sensible way of getting traffic to your site and I can suggest something thats fast and easy traffic generator and that is the SEM (Search engine marketing) via add placements through bidding positions in Googles and Yahoo pay per click section (Adwords and Overture Yahoo search marketing)
Are your products tangible or intangible ? This is important cause intangible (non physical products) distribution online is different to tangible physical products - consider packaging, shipping, weighing hassles. Moreover, If youre in Indonesia, its almost impossible to connect a third party payment processor to your site when selling intangible products. The only way is to make an internet merchant account outside of Indonesia and possibly linking it through verisign and thawte for authentication and encryption technology. If youre selling tangle products consider your self more lucky since you could always integrate your CC payment online through payment processors (2checkout, paysystems) and not having to worry about scripting the connectors and having the hassle of needing to make an internet merchant account. The discount fee is also affordable in payment processors, for example, 2checkout offers a 5% discount and less than 1% charge for every sale that you make online.
Size,Texture and other elements.. If you have tangible products, you may also want to consider how many unique products including variations in size, texture, and other features that you want to offer. Ofcourse you should always weigh each products and measure its dimensions (both packaged and unpackaged) so that you will have data for shipping purposes later on and for customer reference.
Different pricing, Dynamic or HTML static website ..Then I think you will need to determine if different groups of customers will see different pricing on the same items. This is related to whether youre going to offer special promotional pricing, seasonal sales or other forms of temporary pricing or volume discounts maybe?,, rebates? pricing variations. All these confidential pricing variations would almost always means you need to create a dynamic website as oppose to html static site.
Channel distribution .Remeber also that if you already own an offline channel distribution for your product, your product shown on the internet (if you have a high search engine positioning placements on some critical traffic keywords) you may just create an unwanted conflict for your business. I reckon you should make sure you address your pricing strategies to make sure you dont go cutting your distribution channel with an online venture.
Navigation ? I forgot to mention about the website and its navigation. This is one of the most important elements that your customers will remember. Whether or not they can easily navigate through the website to find what theyre looking for will also be a determinant of your online business success. I truely think that the more fun you can make this process the more often your customer is likely to return.
Customer Dialogue to reduce chargebacks and cancellations. When youre business is online, remember the 24/7 component of the business. This means you will be open for business for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. The part where you have to answer questions from customers and assiting customers not to mention if there is a complaint will never stop. You must determine how you will respond to all sorts of customer questions regardless of the medium. Who will answer emails, accept phone calls, faxes snail mails etc. The way to go about solving this to make written policies and procedures for handling customer complaints, or integrate a e-CRM (for instance salesforce.com, Talisma.com, Rightnow.com) or/and a CIM(Liverperson.com, Rightnow.com) system on your site. if you don't care about this part, I gurantee you will get alot of chargebacks, cancellations and returns. More about this later...
Cart.. ?Another important element is order processing. This has to do with the website having a shopping cart and all. (if not a shopping cart then it should be be basket or something in that form)
Shipping expenses and terms and conditions..?, I am sure you will agree with me that none of your customer or anybody shopping online will put up with calculating their shipping cost. So It is important to offer a customer a full itemized list of the cost involved in each sale, with a clear listing of teh currency involved, terms of delivery or performance, and terms and conditions, cancellations.
Credit card payment - think about ways of accepting payments. I mentioned this above on the payment processor part. This is always possible and easy to do.
Fraud checking and Validation, I dont know if you realize this... or you will only be able to realise this if youve actually experienced being a merchant of an online store. What ever happens a merchant is always in the lossing side of a bad transactions. There was a case from my client, where a customer who had actually received a product told the bank to cancel the transaction and the customer didnt ever need to resend back the product thus my client who happens to be the merchant at that time, lost it all on that transaction. This is just one case, there are alot more...Anyways, the merchant looses in any case unless you prevent these kind of things to happen. So implement a really good fraud prevention and checking, both manually and automatically.
Product Availability, when you launch your site I strongly suggest that you offer only those products that are in your immediate inventory.
Back orders preparations. You will also realise that at times there will be times when your products or items that had just been purchased online will be out of stock. So what happens? you will have to notify the customer that this item can be back ordered, or you may have to offer a substitution. Read on other sites or search on 30 days e-commerce, there are rules you will have to follow when doing this, cause if you don't and youre using a payment processor, you may loose your internet merchant account from the payment processor. That is why, did I tell you why I chose cigarettes as a product to sell?.. the reason was at that time, it was all availble everywhere...I had one shop located in front of my house where I use to buy before shipping them.
