eCommerce – A Plan

Planning an ecommerce web site is like building a house – architecture and budget would like 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 would like to be evaluated and costed against that specification are:

– Project management
– Hardware
– Net style and software
– Website marketing
– Project management:

All aspects of the project want to be managed. Decide who’s going to try to to it and properly set up the necessities, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.

Hardware:

Your selections here are a managed service or your own server. The safety and disaster recovery facet that is achieved by hosting with a significant supplier is very important. Solely go together with your own server if you’ve got the experience and facilities.

Design and Software:

Website style

Develop site templates and test them with real people. They need to be easy to use and navigate. Don’t let “style” drive the location; let simple use and sales drive the “design”. Suppose how the customer thinks.

Software

A minimum of five solutions need to be considered.

– Updating
– Searching cart
– Forum
– Email
– Statistics

Updating

There are two realistic routes here. Either an online or an offline, PC primarily based content management system (CMS). The net CMS can be either an Open Source CMS (Open Source means that any application that has been created accessible, generally free, to developers to view and modify freely. Samples of Open Supply applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.

There are pros and cons to each routes. An on-line system is out there to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC primarily based system is, obviously, restricted to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a PC based system is Macromedia Contribute that integrates with Dreamweaver. There are an entire range of on-line Industrial and Open Source options like SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website Baker etc. However, even this is difficult by the very fact that some of the looking cart solutions conjointly contain CMS that will be sufficient for many companies’ requirements.

Searching cart and CRM

There are also two realistic routes for the shopping cart – Open Source or commercial.

There are wonderful Open Supply searching carts like OSCommerce and Zen, however additionally glorious business solutions such as Actinic and Client Focus Quick Order Portal (which comes with an entire CMS).

There are more factors to think about with the shopping cart:

– Will it have its own or does it easily integrate along with your exiting stock management systems?

– Does it integrate simply with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?

– Will it have or integrate simply with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems which will be proposed in future?

Forum

Many CMS have good integrated forums however if they are doing not our recommendation would be to use a sensible Open Supply package like PunBB or phpBB. They are free, strong and straightforward 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 will not have an efficient integrated email answer and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Source applications like PHPlist are one various resolution and the opposite is an on-line resolution like Constant Contact or many others.

Statistics

This can be arguably the most vital half of the package. If you do not apprehend how guests to your website and within the search are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it is far, far more durable to enhance sales and site profitability. Commercial applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks want to be evaluated for best fit.

SITE MARKETING

There are 4 major areas to contemplate here.

– Offline marketing – e.g. in-store. What works most price effectively to drive traffic and orders via the net from non-net activities.

– Site optimisation – how to form certain technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a range of other factors are initially and stay optimised so that as several high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.

– Pay per click and different on-line selling – how to get traffic from advertising against key words and phrases used in search engines and from adverts on alternative sites.

– Email – how to grow the e-mail list and use it to grow profitable sales.

In summary:

– Manage the project
– Assume how the client thinks
– Get excellent software to make finding product and value straightforward
– Make terms clear and payment easy
– Guarantee you are in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
– Build sure you’ve got a good CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai
– Market the positioning appropriately
– Understand what’s happening – use your stats to check, track and try

Price ………… well how long could be a pice of string, but you’ll be up and running for far but the value of recent premises!!!

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