E-Commerce

Integrating Electronic Commerce Capabilities
Into Your Web Site

The implementation of electronic commerce at a web site involves a co-ordinated effort of design, marketing, promotion, and fulfillment. At its essence, there can only be commerce if you are paid by a customer for your product or service. There are essentially four ways for your site to take advantage of e-commerce in the receipt of payments. The kind of business you run will in large part determine which of these is best for you. You need to have a merchant account with a bank allowing you to accept credit cards, and of course, you can start out with one method and change at any time to one of the others.

When you contact us, we can more fully explore what is most appropriate for your specific needs, but in the meantime, this will provide an overview of the options:

OVERVIEW:

If you sell any kind of product, you will want the visitor to your web site to have the opportunity to purchase your product directly from your site using their credit card. All credit card transactions need to be sent securely, which requires a software product capable of using the sophisticated encryption of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).

Some of the criteria you need to consider when looking at this software are:

• What is the ease of set up?
• How many products can it handle?
• Do you need real time credit card authorization (more expensive), or is manual verification adequate (less expensive)?
• Can it import data from a database?
• How does it track visitors to your online store?
• How does it handle sales tax and shipping?
• Does it automatically send an email order acknowledgement to the customer?
• How are you made aware that you have an order?
• How easy is it to change product data on the web site?
• Does the software generate any reports regarding customer behavior and buying patterns during their visit to your site?

1) BUYING SOFTWARE:

If you decide to purchase such software, it will be installed at your server, by your server administrator. The fee for this will vary, but expect to pay at least $250 just for the installation at the server end. The actual coding for the shopping cart is integrated by your web site designer, so due to the increased time required, that is also an additional cost incurred. There are a number of products available for you to purchase which can fulfill your needs, which will vary in price from $500 to several thousand dollars.

2) "THIRD PARTY" SECURED SHOPPING CART SOLUTIONS:

This ecommerce solution allows the small business person to add a secured shopping cart to their site WITHOUT having to purchase software. Rather, you pay a monthly fee to the service for the use of their secured server, and integrate the "buy button" into your own site's code. This fee averages about $250 per year, though depending on what you want it can be half that, or even zero. Also, with some of the services, an additional per transaction fee might be charged.

3) SOFTWARE INCLUDED WITH HOSTING PROVIDER

More and more ISP's are bundling a basic shopping cart application with their commercial hosting services. This is a good option if you find an ISP that you feel is dependable. As with any business agreement, make sure you understand all the fine print, as many of these free shopping carts are actually very limited. If you only have a relatively few items online, or don't want to pay more for visitor tracking stats or database management, then they may be completely adequate.

4) ONLINE "CYBERMALLS"

Depending on the kind of product you are offering through your business, you might find it advantageous to check out listing some of your items at an already established online mall. In this case, the cybermall will handle all the credit card transactions for you when those listed items sell from their site. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of such Internet addresses, some of which are for specific kinds of products only, while others will sell almost anything at the one location.

You will need to ask:

• What are the monthly fees?
• Is there a long term contract?
• Will they take a cut from every sale?
• Is there a per transaction fee?
• How promptly are you paid for your sales?
• Must you provide the pages already coded, or do you just provide the text and pictures so they can do the coding (and then integrate the pages into their site)? If they do the coding, what is the charge?
• How easy is it for customers to find your listings? In other words, how many layers of navigation must a visitor to the site go through before they find you? [NOTE: Customers need to find you as EASILY as possible!!]
• Will you get statistics every month indicating the level of traffic to the mall as a whole, and to your site specifically?

5) OFFLINE ORDER / BUSINESS CONTACT:

If your firm provides a service, as opposed to a product, then you will not necessarily need a shopping cart application. Also, many small businesses just getting on the WWW do not want to offer online ordering until they are comfortable that their web presence is appropriate for their specific requirements. In these cases, the web site will not offer secured shopping cart capabilities, but instead will provide alternate methods of order fulfillment. These include:

• Email: The customer sends you an email with their telephone number, and you call them back.
• Phone: The customer calls you directly. In this case, you should definitely consider a toll free number, as it is clearly documented that toll free numbers encourage contact.
• Fax: The customer prints out an online order form and sends it via fax to you with their credit card information.
• Snail Mail: The customer prints out the order form and mails it to you with a credit card number or a check.
• Brick and Mortar: You provide directions to your place of business (a printable map is especially helpful) so your customers can come by in person.

If you are ready to initiate an online presence, please contact us.