5
Jan
2010
ECommerce – A Arrange
Planning an ecommerce website is like building a house – design and budget want 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
- Net style and software
- Website marketing
- Project management:
All aspects of the project want to be managed. Decide who is going to try and do 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 protection and disaster recovery side that is achieved by hosting with a serious provider is terribly important. Only go with your own server if you have the experience and facilities.
Style and Software:
Web site style
Develop website templates and take a look at them with real people. They have to be easy to use and navigate. Don’t let “design” drive the positioning; let easy use and sales drive the “style”. Suppose how the client thinks.
Software
A minimum of five solutions need to be considered.
- Updating
- Shopping cart
- Forum
- Email
- Statistics
Updating
There are two realistic routes here. Either an on-line or an offline, PC based content management system (CMS). The web CMS will be either an Open Supply CMS (Open Source suggests that any application that has been made available, usually free, to developers to view and modify freely. Examples of Open Source applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.
There are execs and cons to both routes. An on-line system is on the market to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based mostly system is, obviously, restricted to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a PC based mostly system is Macromedia Contribute which integrates with Dreamweaver. There are a whole vary of online Industrial and Open Source choices like SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Web site Baker etc. However, even this can be sophisticated 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 a pair of realistic routes for the looking cart – Open Source or commercial.
There are glorious Open Supply searching carts such as OSCommerce and Zen, however also glorious commercial solutions like Actinic and Client Focus Quick Order Portal (which comes with a whole CMS).
There are other factors to contemplate with the shopping cart:
- Does it have its own or does it easily integrate together with your exiting stock management systems?
- Does it integrate simply with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?
- Does it have or integrate simply with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that may be proposed in future?
Forum
Several CMS have sensible integrated forums however if they do not our recommendation would be to use a good Open Source package such as PunBB or phpBB. They are free, strong and straightforward to integrate and customise into any site.
Most CMS, searching carts and forums have email solutions. But, some solutions are very basic. If the chosen looking cart solution that best meets the ecommerce and other necessities will not have an effective 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 different resolution and the other is an online answer like Constant Contact or several others.
Statistics
This is arguably the foremost necessary half of the package. If you do not grasp how visitors to your web site and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it’s way, so much harder to improve sales and site profitability. Business applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit.
SITE MARKETING
There are 4 major areas to think about here.
- Offline promoting – e.g. in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders via the internet from non-net activities.
- Website optimisation – how to make positive technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a vary of other factors are initially and remain 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 utilized in search engines and from adverts on different sites.
- Email – how to grow the e-mail list and use it to grow profitable sales.
In summary:
- Manage the project
- Think how the client thinks
- Get wonderful software to make finding product and worth straightforward
- Make terms clear and payment straightforward
- Guarantee you’re in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
- Create sure you have got a smart CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai
- Market the positioning appropriately
- Recognize what’s going on – use your stats to test, track and try
Cost ………… well how long could be a pice of string, but you’ll be up and running for a lot but the cost of recent premises!!!
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