E-commerce history

Before there is e-commerce, there was catalog business in which a business sent out product catalogs and let the consumers call or mail to order products. The Internet has changed how traditional catalog business conducts its business and enabled almost any type of business to sell products or services over its web site.

Types of e-commerce web sites

There are two types of e-commerce web sites – Informational e-commerce web sites and Transactional e-commerce web sites

Informational e-commerce web sites consist of static web pages providing essential products and services information of a business. The main purpose of this type of web site is to “inform” the visitors about the company’s products and services and allow the visitor to order products or services by making a phone call or filling out an online order form. There are lots of informational e-commerce web sites on the Internet since it is easy to build and does not need many technical skills to maintain. You can simply save any text file in the Html format and publish the file to your web site. Therefore, it is inexpensive to build an informational e-commerce web site and almost any major businesses out there have some sort of informational e-commerce web sites.

However, businesses soon spotted the drawbacks of the informational e-commerce web sites. They wanted to automate the selling of products or services on their web sites. Thus, the transactional web site was introduced. A transactional web site allows products or services to be “transacted” over two parties. Products or services are sold to a consumer and money is paid to the business automatically without the traditional human interaction. This automation significantly boosted the productivity of conducting a transaction and thus has been widely pursued by almost all types of businesses.

How to build an e-commerce web site

If you are reading this article, you may be one of the businesses seeking a transactional e-commerce web site that you can sell products or services over the Internet. You are wondering how to set up an e-commerce web site…where to start?

1. Select an e-commerce shopping cart.
2. Customize the e-commerce shopping cart to suit your business.
3. Put your products or services online for sell.
4. Promote your web store.

1. Select an e-commerce shopping cart. You need to consider the following factors when selecting a shopping cart.

1. The platform is feature-rich. A typical ecommerce platform offers hundreds of features. Each merchant may need only 10% to 20% of these features for its web site. A feature rich platform gives you more options to turn on for your web site and can reduced the cost of customization if a feature you are seeking is already built in the shopping cart.
2. The shopping cart is customizable. Usually, an ecommerce shopping cart has to be customized to suit a business. At the minimum, the shopping cart needs to be “skinned”, which means that a unique “look and feel” has to be applied to the shopping cart. In addition to the “look and feel”, some functions may need to be customized to fit the business process. All of these “skinning” and “customization needs a shopping cart that is customizable. While purchasing the shopping cart, you need to ask whether the full source code is available to be purchased. The full source code usually gives you unlimited ways to customize the shopping cart. You need to pay attention to the cost of the customization. For the same custom function, the cost of customization will be different from one shopping cart to another.
3. The shopping cart is reliable and scalable. The shopping cart needs to be stable and does not throw unwanted error messages. It should also be scalable if your business transaction volume grows.
4. The shopping cart is built on mainstream programming languages. To customize the shopping cart, you need to have a developer build the custom functions. The developer will program using the programming language used by the shopping cart manufacture to build the shopping cart. Most of the shopping carts are built on mainstream programming languages such as C#, VB, PHP and Java. There are also some shopping carts built on proprietary languages such as miva for Miva Merchant. In short, you need to understand which programming language is used in your shopping cart and hire the right developer who is specialized in that programming language to do the job.
5. The shopping cart offers excellent support. Support is very important factor in selecting a shopping cart since you will not have the time to evaluate each and every feature offered by the shopping cart. Browse through the user manual and see if you can get a general idea of the shopping cart. If the documentation is poorly written, then chances are the code is poorly written. You may also test the response time of the shopping cart support department, send an email to the company and see how soon it is responded. Chat online with the shopping cart vender and try to feel their professionalism.
6. Cost – the shopping cart should not be too expensive and thus out of your reach. There are two types of licensing by major shopping cart companies. Monthly fee and One Time Fee. This is a chart of the total cost of ownership for an ecommerce shopping cart.
7. Make sure the shopping cart support your payment gateway. A typical shopping cart should support at least 20 payment gateways and this should not be your concern. However, certain merchant may be using a special payment gateway that a shopping cart does not support. Send an email to the shopping cart vender and ask whether they are will to add this payment gateway into its shopping cart. If the vendor wants to charge you, make sure the cost is not too high.
8. Select between a licensed and a hosted solution. The major consideration is the level of customization you need from the shopping cart. If you have very unique business requirement, selecting a licensed software is recommended. This is a comparison chart of licensed and hosted shopping cart.

There are over 100 shopping carts on the market, Misakko consulting will periodically publish our comparison charts to help a merchant decide the right shopping cart. The following is a comparison chart of AspDotNetStoreFront vs. StoreFront vs. Volusion vs. Monstercommerce vs. Oscommerce

Chart: Coming soon...
 

2. Customize the e-commerce shopping cart to suit your business.

1. Once you have selected the shopping cart, you can purchase the software and its source code.
2. Find a reliable and experience customization partner who has rich experience in customizing the shopping cart you selected.
3. Get a unique skin design. Pay attention that the graphic designer needs to know some fundamental principles of design a shopping cart “look and feel”. The design should not miss out any necessary elements of a functional shopping cart. For example, the category page should have paging element to control how many products are shown in one page. The visitor needs to page through the next page to see more products.  
4. Implement the skin design into the shopping cart software. This is a necessary step no matter where you have got your graphic design done. Skin implementation is a process to transform the graphic image into a live shopping cart pages. It’s a somewhat labor intensive task in which HTML, CSS and Javascripts will be manual coded and aligned.
5. Customize the functions. Usually the shopping cart you have chosen should have at least 85% of the functions you are seeking. The rest 10% to 15% need to be customized to suit your unique business process. You need to specify the unique function and send it to the customization partner for a quote. Pay attention to the engineering capability of the customization partner and ask whether the can deliver in time. Also ask if the project is delayed, what penalty will be imposed to the customization partner.
6. Test your store. You need to conduct user acceptance testing before paying in full to the customization partner. Once the site has been developed to your satisfaction, you can launch the site. Note: avoid hiring more than one company to do the customization job for you. Coordination among two or more technical providers will cost you extra unnecessary time and money. If an issue rises, it is often troublesome to trace down which provider caused the problem. So, the rule of thumb is to select one right customization partner.

3. Put your products or services online for sell.

1. Upload category and product to the store. You need to first add product categories or service categories into the store. If you are selling less than 100 products, you can manually add each product into the shopping cart using the admin console. Adding a product consist of inputting the product title, product description, product image and the related products information. You need to also map a product to a product category or categories if this product belongs to more than one category. This process is tedious if you have more than 100 products to upload. Therefore, automation is needed by balk upload products into the store. Bulk uploading products into the store. The shopping cart software should have provided a bulk uploading method such as importing an Excel sheet. You should be able to fill out this excel sheet with hundreds or even thousands of products and import this sheet once and for all.
2. Turn on the payment gateway and the shipping gateway (optionally). To accept credit cards you need to have a merchant payment gateway such as Authorize.net, Paypal or Google Checkout. If you need to physically a package to your client, you have the option of turn on real time shipping gateway with UPS, FedEx, USPS or DHL. The real time shipping gateway will query the shipper’s database and get a real time shipping cost for the order to be shipped. 
3. Go Live

4. Promote your web store. Like any traditional store, setting up a store is the first step. The second step is to promote your store and let people know your existence. Typical promotion programs for an online store are: search engine optimization, affiliate program, email marketing and paid advertisement.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to your web site from search engines via natural search results.
2. Affiliate Program is a program that let other people refer leads to your store and in return you pay a referral fee to the referrer.
3. Email Marketing is a method of sending out advertisement or news letters via e-email to your potential customer.
4. Paid advertisement is advertising on the internet via text link ad or banner advertisement.