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E-Commerce Primer

© Faith Sloan

E-commerce gets all the buzz these days. There are many solutions you can implement to get you on your way to selling products via the World Wide Web.

One of the biggest challenges in creating a successful online store is choosing the right software solution to meet your customers needs. Choose the 'wrong' solution and you might as well burn your hard earned cash. There aren't any magic forumulas but this article will help provide you with an overview of available software and which factors should be considered during your software selection phase.

To jump on the e-commerce bandwagon, you need to design your web site and be sure to have engaging content, a wealth of customer-centric information, a products catalog, the ability to perform online transactions, and provide quick and informative feedback and results. The most critical decision is determining which e-commerce software you should use to tackle this job.

Of course, you could build it yourself but that would require that you be very technically savvy or have enough money to hire e-commerce architects and database experts. Take my word for it: it's cheaper to buy than it is to build.

First ask the question: do you want your e-commerce software to run out "of the box," or do you expect to further customize the software? Some products are geared towards a complete solution; others are more like software toolkits where programming expertise is essential and expected. You also need to consider the traffic you expect to have in your store. Some products are designed to scale well as your business grows and other products are designed to work well for small sites with low traffic.

All e-commerce software solutions must have:

• a product catalog where the online customers select what they want to order
• a shopping cart where product selections are collected
• secure transactions including credit authorization and other payment types
• order processing

The product catalog is the most important item on the list. Here is where you display product pictures, descriptions, and prices. However, a Web-based product catalog can be a fully interactive shopping experience, including video, sound, etc. Making a multimedia web-based product catalog is not easy or inexpensive. Collecting and incorporating images, sounds, etc. for hundreds or thousands of products is both a major organizational effort and a complex job for the e-commerce storefront developer.

Next month, I'll write about some off the shelf solutions which take a bit of the burden off of your shoulders.