10 Important Considerations for an E-Commerce Site:
1. Does your current web site support the addition of a shopping cart?
- Shopping carts are built with special coding languages and require a database, usually SQL.
- The cart must be compatible with your merchant services account and payment gateway.
- Check with your hosting company to make sure their servers can host your chosen cart.
- Check with your payment gateway provider and merchant services to be sure your cart is
compatible with their software.
2. Do you need your domain name and url address to be the brand for your store?
- If the answer is yes, you need a custom solution.
3. Do you need to accept credit and debit cards, and don't want to use PayPal?
- If the answer is yes, you need a custom solution.
4. Do you have an internet merchant account and payment gateway?
- If you are not using PayPal, you must have an internet merchant account and a payment
gateway.
- Your bank must be able to process deposits from your internet merchant account.
5. SSL - Secure Sockets Layer - for protection of your and your clients' information!
- Some hosting companies offer Shared-SSL, but your store's url address will reflect the host's
name before your website's name, so you may want to purchase your own Certificate.
6. All-in-One Solutions - how do they work?
- Some hosting companies offer All-in-One solutions: Hosting, SSL, Shopping Cart, Payment
Gateway and Merchant Services Account.
- While this may be a good short-term option, if you ever needed to change hosts, you would
find that your shopping cart would no longer work on the new host's server, and you would
have to have your store re-built. It's something to consider.
- Make sure to compare fees and rates for the credit card and currency conversion services.
7. Are Branding and Marketing the Brand important to your business plan?
- If the answer is yes, you need a custom solution.
8. How will your inventory images be processed and served?
- Advanced e-commerce uses "rich media applications" that give the shopper a heightened
experience, using Flash elements and Catalogue Flip-Books.
- A typical e-commerce site simply loads the images onto the page, and has standard image
enlargement capabilities, sometimes using Flash.
- Images for e-commerce sites must be highly-compressed for quick loading.
9. Back-End Integration - Knowing when your client has made a purchase!
- The 3 shopping carts listed in the Checklist have either no or minimal back-end integration.
Minimal integration would be sending you an email when a client makes a purchase.
- On an integrated site, you can actually follow a client through the site, see their location (via
their IP address) and know through your Control Panel that a purchase has been initiated.
10. How important are Web Analytics to your ROI (Return on Investment)?
- The 3 shopping carts listed in the Checklist have either no or minimal tracking capabilities.
- It is important to know your visitors' route through your site; how they arrived, what pages
they viewed and where they were when they left your site for another one. This helps in
determining how to best manage the site and where changes need to be made to retain traffic.
- Google Analytics is free and widely-used.
- Commercial analytics software is also available. It gives a much more detailed analysis.
Do you have more questions? Fill out our Contact Form, here!
| 
