E-Commerce Steps
How to Build an Internet Store
These are the steps for building your internet store:
1
Determine Products and Strategies -
Formulate a Plan
It is important before you
start building your website, or adding e-commerce to an existing site, to
determine your plan. Determine what your are going to sell, and
outline the major product categories. This will be the beginning of
your "site plan" and lay the groundwork for the decisions you will make
along the process. Are your products something you will have in
inventory, such as diesel jeans?
Or words of wisdom such as an e-book that will be electronically delivered?
Inventory is a primary question, because it involves having items on hand.
The main decision is whether you will actually have the items and want to go
ahead and charge the customer's credit card immediately, or whether you want
to review the order first to ensure you have inventory before going forward.
These are important decisions, critical to customer service and customer
satisfaction.
Here is an interesting article which outlines the
features needed for your e-commerce
store.
2
Merchant Account
Will you be accepting credit
cards? Will you have a merchant account? Or will you use a
service such as PayPal to take credit cards. What are the
drawbacks to PayPal? On the plus side, it is relatively inexpensive
from the merchant's perspective. It is also easy to integrate onto a
website. As for the negatives, some online retailers do not want to
ask their customers to "join Paypal". This is an inhibitor for some
buyers.
If you plan to get a merchant
account, you will need to visit with your banker or a broker who handles
these things. In most cases, if you primarily have an internet store,
the institution will want to see your "working website" before granting you
the account.
3
Products
You will need to have a list
of the products you are offering, along with these items:
Product Code
Description
Price
Product Image
Shipping Information (if applicable)
4
Shipping and Handling
One of the important things to
decide is how you are going to charge for shipping and handling. There
are several methods that are used:
Order Totals
Shipping Amount by Product
Real-time information from FedX, UPS, or USPS (this requires a product
weight or dimension)
5
Selection of a Shopping Cart
Webcrew will help you
determine the best shopping cart for the website based on your plan, product
line, budget, and other factors.
6
Determine whether you are going to
"instantly charge" the buyer's card
If you are going to run the
charges immediately, you will need to get a clearing house to help with this
process. The larger ones are
www.authorize.net, www.verisign.com,
and www.linkpoint.com We are
also familiar with many other processors.
7
Start Building
With these decisions underway,
you are ready to start building. You can expect the process to take
2-4 days per product page. This depends on the complexity of your site
and the number of products you are offering. Many customers choose to
complete their site in stages, and start with 8-10 pages and grow from
there.
Questions?
Call us at 214.954.1123
webcrew.com - Real help for
small business website owners |
