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Planning
an ecommerce website is like building a house –
architecture and budget need to be agreed before the decoration.
At this point, you'll want to draw up an AGREED REQUIREMENTS
SPECIFICATION.
Once an AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION has
been agreed then solutions need to be evaluated and costed against that
specification are:
- Project management
- Hardware
- Web design and
software
- Site marketing
Project management: All aspects of the
project need to be managed. Decide who is going to do it and properly
plan the requirements, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.
Hardware: Your choices here are a managed service or your own server.
The security and disaster recovery aspect that is achieved by hosting
with a major provider is very important. Only go with your own server
if you have the experience and facilities.
Design and Software: Site
design Develop site templates and test them with real people. They have
to be easy to use and navigate. Don't let "design" drive the site; let
ease of use and sales drive the "design". Think how the customer
thinks.
Software: At least 5 solutions need to be considered.
- Updating
- Shopping cart
- Forum
- Email
- Statistics Updating
There are 2
realistic routes here. Either an online or an offline, PC based content
management system (CMS). The online CMS can be either an Open Source
CMS (Open Source means any application that has been made available,
generally free, to developers to view and modify freely. Examples of
Open Source applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial. There are
pros and cons to both routes.
An online system is available to anyone
with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based system
is, obviously, limited to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a
PC based system is Macromedia Contribute which integrates with
Dreamweaver. There are a whole range of online Commercial and Open
Source options such as SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website
Baker etc.
However, even this is complicated by the fact that some of
the shopping cart solutions also contain CMS that may be sufficient for
many companies’ requirements. Shopping cart and CRM There are
also 2 realistic routes for the shopping cart – Open Source or
commercial. There are excellent Open Source shopping carts such as
OSCommerce and Zen, but also excellent commercial solutions such as
Actinic and Customer Focus Quick Order Portal (which comes with a
complete CMS).
There are other factors to consider with the shopping
cart:
- Does it have its own or does it easily integrate with your
exiting stock control systems?
- Does it integrate easily with
accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?
- Does it have or integrate
easily with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that may be
proposed in future?
Forum: Many CMS have good integrated forums but if
they do not our recommendation would be to use a good Open Source
package such as PunBB or phpBB. They are free, robust and easy to
integrate and customise into any site. Email Most CMS, shopping carts
and forums have email solutions. However, some solutions are very
basic.
If the chosen shopping cart solution that best meets the
ecommerce and other requirements does not have an effective integrated
email solution and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions
then stand alone Open Source applications such as PHPlist are one
alternative solution and the other is an online solution such as
Constant Contact or many others.
Statistics: This is arguably the most
important part of the package. If you do not know how visitors to your
website and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns
them off then it is far, far harder to improve sales and site
profitability. Commercial applications such as WebTrends and
ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit.
SITE MARKETING
There are
4 major areas to consider here.
- Offline marketing – e.g.
in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders
via the web from non-web activities.
- Site optimisation – how to
make sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a range of
other factors are initially and remain optimised so that as many high
search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.
- Pay per
click and other online marketing – how to get traffic from
advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and
from adverts on other sites.
- Email – how to grow the email list
and use it to grow profitable sales.
In summary:
- Manage the project
-
Think how the customer thinks
- Get excellent software to make finding
product and price easy
- Make terms clear and payment simple
- Ensure
you are in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
- Make
sure you have a good CRM system and clear communications – mail,
phone, email
- Market the site appropriately
- Know what's going on
– use your stats to test, track and try
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Handy Guides: eCommerce
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