eCommerce – A Plan
February 10, 2010 – 10:11 amDesigning an ecommerce website is like building a house – architecture and budget need to be agreed before the decoration.
AN AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION MUST BE DRAWN UP AS THE FIRST STAGE BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE IS DONE – ANY OTHER APPROACH WILL ONLY LEAD TO CONFUSION AND WORSE.
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
– Website marketing
– Project management:
All aspects of the project need to be managed. Decide who’s going to try and do it and properly set up the wants, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.
Hardware:
Your decisions here are a managed service or your own server. The safety and disaster recovery side that’s achieved by hosting with a significant supplier is terribly important. Only go with your own server if you have got the expertise and facilities.
Style and Software:
Website design
Develop website templates and take a look at them with real people. They have to be straightforward to use and navigate. Don’t let “design” drive the positioning; let ease of use and sales drive the “style”. Think how the customer thinks.
Software
A minimum of five solutions want to be considered.
– Updating
– Searching cart
– Forum
– Email
– Statistics
Updating
There are 2 realistic routes here. Either an on-line or an offline, PC based mostly content management system (CMS). The net CMS can be either an Open Source CMS (Open Supply suggests that any application that has been made out there, usually free, to developers to read and modify freely. Examples of Open Supply applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.
There are execs and cons to both routes. An on-line system is offered to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based system is, clearly, limited to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a PC based system is Macromedia Contribute that integrates with Dreamweaver. There are a full vary of online Industrial and Open Source choices like SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website Baker etc. However, even this is often complicated by the fact that a number of the shopping cart solutions additionally contain CMS that will be sufficient for many corporations’ requirements.
Looking cart and CRM
There are a pair of realistic routes for the looking cart – Open Source or commercial.
There are glorious Open Source shopping carts like OSCommerce and Zen, however also wonderful commercial solutions like Actinic and Client Focus Fast Order Portal (that comes with an entire CMS).
There are more factors to contemplate with the shopping cart:
– Does it have its own or will it easily integrate along with your exiting stock control systems?
– Will it integrate simply with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?
– Does it have or integrate simply with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that will be proposed in future?
Forum
Several CMS have sensible integrated forums however if they do not our recommendation would be to use a sensible Open Source package like PunBB or phpBB. They are free, robust and easy to integrate and customise into any site.
Most CMS, shopping carts and forums have email solutions. However, some solutions are very basic. If the chosen looking cart answer that best meets the ecommerce and other needs does not have an efficient integrated email answer and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Supply applications like PHPlist are one various answer and the opposite is an online solution such as Constant Contact or several others.
Statistics
This is often arguably the most necessary half of the package. If you are doing not understand how visitors to your website and in the search are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it’s far, so much more durable to enhance sales and website profitability. Commercial applications like WebTrends and ClickTracks would like to be evaluated for best fit.
SITE MARKETING
There are 4 major areas to consider here.
– Offline promoting – e.g. in-store. What works most value effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-web activities.
– Website optimisation – how to form sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a vary of different factors are initially and stay optimised thus that as several high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.
– Pay per click and other online selling – how to urge traffic from advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and from adverts on different sites.
– Email – a way to grow the email list and use it to grow profitable sales.
In outline:
– Manage the project
– Assume how the customer thinks
– Get excellent software to create finding product and worth simple
– Make terms clear and payment easy
– Guarantee you are in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
– Build certain you have got a smart CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai
– Market the positioning appropriately
– Grasp what’s happening – use your stats to test, track and attempt
Value ………… well how long could be a pice of string, however you could be up and running for far less than the price of new premises!!!
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Tags: content management, e-commerce, Internet Business, online business, plan, shopping cart