| Let's take a look at what you need. From your requirements, it is clear that the main objective of you going online is to spread your customer base. We suggest a phased development here. It is important that you get your feet wet, know what it is to serve customers online.
Phase I would be to hit the ground running. This would essentially be a catalog site where visitors get to see the products you have to offer.
Phase II would get you moving to actually selling online.
Phase III would involve getting aggressive with building traffic on to the site.
Phase I
We suggest that you start with a basic catalogue site and get the ball rolling. The primary objective of this site would be to establish an online presence and increase the exposure of your business. The site would help visitors know the merchandise you have to offer. The visitors can sit at the comfort of their home and know what's available and at what price..
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1.1 What are the necessary features that your site would require?
Catalog
 You as the merchant need to enter information about your merchandise. The catalog module allows you to enter this information. You could also upload pictures for each product. The merchant can enter information like the name of the product, product code, price, quantity, etc. We suggest that you organize products in three-layer hierarchy. Category -> sub-category ->product. This would help visitors find the product using a drill down approach.
You might have this information already in a spreadsheet format. We would provide the facility to download information from a spreadsheet.
The visitor needs an interface to browse the products. The Catalog module provides this functionality as well. We can either suggest a suitable interface for your website or if you have any sample design that you would like to replicate, we can recreate the same for you. We can integrate all the images that will represent your product range. These images will be edited and then integrated to look good on the site. In phase I, we suggest that you stick to basic hierarchy-based product listing.
This would be the most essential component for the site. This would allow you to upload information on the site and will allow visitors to browse the catalog.
Customer interaction features
The Customer continues to be the key even in an online business. We suggest a couple of initiatives to keep in touch with your customer and give the customer a personalized interaction.
a. An email link on the site for the customer to enquire about some product
b. Allow visitors to subscribe to a newsletter.
1.2 Before you start
What do you need before you start?
Domain name
Registering and owning a domain name is an essential branding strategy. The domain name should be catchy and easy to remember.
Server and hosting
You would need a hosting provider to provide these services. For phase I, we would suggest a shared server which supports server-side scripting and a database.
Product information
This is going to be a major exercise. You would need to collect all information in one place. You would need to collect or take photographs and scan them.
1.3 After launch
1.3.1 Maintaining the catalog
It's important that the catalog is kept up to date.
Remember that the online customer has a number of options available and her attention span is not much either. The slightest inconsistency or error on the site can assure you that she would be visiting your competitor's site very soon.
1.3.2 Customer support
It is important to respond to a visitor's query through email. Visitors who browse the net are usually comfortable shooting an email and they expect a quick reply. Make sure that you have one person who is completely responsible for responding to email queries.
A Newsletter is another way to keep the customer in touch. We suggest that you make the efforts in generating fresh, updated and relevant information and incorporate it in a well-designed newsletter. Although, this might take time and require setting aside a dedicated resource to work on this regularly, it is worth the effort and time.
Phase II
2.1 Components
Catalog and inventory management
This phase involves customers buying products online. So it is essential to have an inventory management module attached to the catalog module. Inventory management module would help you - the merchant, know when to replenish your products and it will help customers know what is in stock.
Shopping cart
A Shopping cart is where the visitor collects and records purchasing decisions. Research shows that a majority of shoppers leave the site after adding products to the shopping cart. It is essential that the shopping cart addresses some key issues that visitors might have. The most important aspect is to have complete information available to the user. The moment the visitor feels the slightest doubt; she will jump to the next site. It is therefore very important to make the buying and selecting process easy enough for the visitor so that she comes back a second time. Some key information to be made available to the user would be shipping charges and tax. An invoice with the order number should also be available for the visitor to save or print.
Read more about our e-store packages here.
Payment
This component allows you to receive money online. We propose to tie up with a payment gateway service. The gateway service usually gives you an interface to monitor transactions happening on your site.
We suggest that you also look at alternate payment options like Paypal.
Shipping
The online model would work only if you can fulfill the order. Customers expect shipping to happen seamlessly once they finish the transaction on the site. We propose to use third-party-service providers to supply shipping rates online depending on the vendor, source, destination and kind of service. Companies like FedEx and UPS give the facility to track shipments online once they are shipped.
Statistics
The advantage with the online model is that statistics are easily available. Of course, we need to plan and study the market and target audience before we launch the site. It is very useful to see what people are purchasing, how often they are purchasing it, etc. We suggest that you tie up with a third-party-service provider in order to help analyse the traffic on your site. The data we collect would be useful for our next phase.
2.2 Before you start
Merchant account
You need a merchant account to receive payment online.
There are few prerequisites for obtaining a merchant account. Some of them are listed below.
- It would be helpful to have the website ready and the fact that you are selling things online made obvious on the site.
- Make the price of the products clearly available online
- Indicate the return policy
- Describe the shipping policy
- Address and phone number should be easy to find.
- Make available proof of your identity and proof that your business is legal
- Make known the measures taken for security like SSL.
Payment gateway
You need to sign up with a payment gateway service to actually enable transactions. Some of the payment gateways are Linkpoint and Verisign.
Server and hosting
We suggest a virtual server for this phase. If the traffic builds up, we can move it to a dedicated server at a later date. We will need server side-scripting and database capabilities on the server.
Since we are dealing with credit card transactions, a minimum requirement is to have a secure server. Here again we need to purchase these security features from someone like Verisign or Thawte. Usually the hosting company would have a tie up to provide you with a security server.
2.3 After launch
Inventory
It is important to keep watch on the inventory. You as the merchant will have to make sure the online store is always well-stocked. Read on more for further information on inventory management.
Shipping
It is possible to handle shipping on your own. But we would suggest that you evaluate companies who specialize in fulfilling orders. They are better equipped to handle this job. You will need an interface to monitor and update the shipping status.
Support
You now have a store, which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It is important to have quality customer support that will ensure that you retain all the customers who visit your site. You could possibly limit the support hours to business hours in the US, but increasingly, with customers coming onto your site from the rest of the world, they expect real people to respond to queries in real-time.
We suggest that you offer email and chat support features on the site. If you are interested in outsourcing your web site support and maintenance work, we have a Customer Care team that excels in this kind of work. Click here for more information.
Statistics
The online model has the advantage of storing all kinds of data. We suggest integrating a third party solution to get data like -
- How many unique visits are you getting per month? Is the number increasing or decreasing?
- What products are people looking at most? And what are they looking at the least?
- Which site are the visitors coming from?
- Which page is used most by visitors coming to your site?
- At which page do visitors leave your site?
- Through what pages are most of your visitors leaving your site?
- What are the search items people are entering into the search engines to find you?
- What is the percentage of people using different web browsers and different resolutions while visiting your site
The statistical data helps us to continually improve the site for a better user experience.
Phase III
Now that you have the back-end firmly in place, it's time to go aggressive on getting traffic to the site.
3.1 Components
Affiliate marketing
 A common and effective method of getting the right kind of traffic onto your site is through affiliate marketing. This is a proven method of building traffic to your site and making sure that you pay only for results. This would involve your affiliates marketing your products and bringing traffic to your site while all transactions happen at your site.
Purchases made through affiliates are tracked. Both you and the affiliate would have an interface to view how each of them are doing and how much commission ought to be paid to them.
To understand how we can help you promote your site on the search engines through the use of relevant keywords and key phrases, read on for more information here.
Auctions
For those special pieces, an auction is a good option. This would help build a lot of traffic to the site.
Other business models
The internet continues to throw up new business models. We would encourage you to keep thinking of newer and better ways to sell.
3.2 Before you start
It is essential that the models you have in mind be clearly put down on paper. We would not advise working on newer models unless sufficient thought has gone to it.
3.3 After launch
More monitoring. The statistics we propose to implement can be used again. For every new model deployed we suggest that you can keep an eye on the visitors. Track and understand visitor behavior on your web site and use this information to make strategic decisions about your web site. |
