eCommerce – A Plan
Planning an ecommerce web site 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 would like to be evaluated and costed against that specification are:
– Project management
– Hardware
– Web design and software
– Site selling
– Project management:
All aspects of the project need to be managed. Decide who is going to try and do it and properly arrange the requirements, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.
Hardware:
Your choices here are a managed service or your own server. The safety and disaster recovery facet that is achieved by hosting with a major provider is very important. Only go along with your own server if you have got the expertise and facilities.
Style and Software:
Website design
Develop website templates and check them with real people. They have to be simple to use and navigate. Don’t let “design” drive the positioning; let ease of use and sales drive the “design”. Assume how the customer thinks.
Software
At least five solutions want to be considered.
– Updating
– Shopping cart
– Forum
– Email
– Statistics
Updating
There are 2 realistic routes here. Either an online or an offline, PC based content management system (CMS). The net CMS can be either an Open Supply CMS (Open Supply means that any application that has been created accessible, typically free, to developers to read and modify freely. Samples of Open Supply applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.
There are execs and cons to each routes. An on-line system is offered to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based mostly system is, clearly, limited to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a PC primarily based system is Macromedia Contribute that integrates with Dreamweaver. There are an entire vary of on-line Industrial and Open Supply options like SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website Baker etc. But, even this is often sophisticated by the very fact that a number of the shopping cart solutions also contain CMS which will be sufficient for many firms’ requirements.
Searching cart and CRM
There are also 2 realistic routes for the looking cart – Open Supply or commercial.
There are glorious Open Supply looking carts like OSCommerce and Zen, but conjointly excellent industrial solutions like Actinic and Customer Focus Quick Order Portal (that comes with an entire CMS).
There are more factors to think about with the searching cart:
– Will it have its own or does it simply integrate with your exiting stock control systems?
– Does it integrate simply with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?
– Does it have or integrate simply with Client Relationship Management (CRM) systems which will be proposed in future?
Forum
Many CMS have smart integrated forums however if they do not our recommendation would be to use a smart Open Source package like PunBB or phpBB. They’re free, strong and easy to integrate and customise into any site.
Most CMS, searching carts and forums have email solutions. But, some solutions are terribly basic. If the chosen shopping cart solution that best meets the ecommerce and other needs will not have an efficient integrated email resolution and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Source applications such as PHPlist are one various answer and the opposite is an online solution such as Constant Contact or many others.
Statistics
This is arguably the foremost necessary half of the package. If you do not know how visitors to your website and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it’s so much, so much harder to boost sales and website profitability. Business applications such as WebTrends and ClickTracks need to be evaluated for best fit.
SITE MARKETING
There are four major areas to think about here.
– Offline promoting – e.g. in-store. What works most cost effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-net activities.
– Site optimisation – how to create certain technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a vary of alternative factors are initially and stay optimised thus that as several high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.
– Pay per click and other on-line 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 e-mail list and use it to grow profitable sales.
In outline:
– Manage the project
– Think how the client thinks
– Get wonderful software to form finding product and value straightforward
– Make terms clear and payment easy
– Ensure you are in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
– Build certain you’ve got a good CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai
– Market the positioning appropriately
– Recognize what is occurring – use your stats to check, track and attempt
Cost ………… well how long may be a pice of string, however you may be up and running for much but the price of new premises!!!
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