Setting Up a Web Shop

There are two parts to selling on the Net. Getting people to your site, and selling to them once they get there. Both need a combination of technical and marketing skills. So either you need to acquire the skills, or buy someone in to help.

The good news is that everything can be self-taught, but there are also plenty of reasonably priced practitioners around.

There are several technical elements that need to be in place, and various choices to be made, before your business can receive orders and process transactions online.

The Software

Desktop software solutions

Internet commerce is now well established, and there is a rich choice of solutions available in the market. It is still possible to have a bespoke site developed specially for you, but packaged software is usually a cheaper, faster and lower risk option. When assessing Internet commerce packages, the cost of the technology required to support the package must also be considered to get a full picture. The wrong package may cost £10,000’s extra to service in terms of the infrastructure that it requires.

Server-based solutions

There are also online solutions based on “servers”. The benefit of these services is they are available using nothing more than your browser, updates to the software are instantly available to you normally pay a monthly fee rather than having a big upfront cost.

The web site 

Most small companies will end up renting web space on someone else’s server. Medium sized companies can rent or buy an entire server which is permanently attached to the Internet at an Internet Service Provider’s site. Large companies will most likely obtain a leased line to the Internet and run their own server, firewall and so on at their own premises. But are these choices the correct ones?

The true cost of these options ranges from around £200 per annum to multiple £10,000’s, so the decision will make a big difference. Don't look at what the company can afford, but which is the most appropriate. Renting 20MB on a server attached by a 2MB link to the internet can often give a faster service to visitors than renting a 64KB leased line, even though the leased line option may cost 20 times more!

The actual choice of web space for hosting a commerce service is determined by the requirements of the chosen software solution.

Online credit card processing

Most shoppers will want to pay by credit or debit card. In order to receive card payments, you must have either a merchant account with card issuer, or an account with a bureau service. If you want to handle the credit card details yourself, your company must comply with the PCI DSS data security standard. Compliance is complicated, difficult and expensive to achieve. For this reason, increasingly most companies are outsourcing card processing to a third-party Payment Service Provider, or PSP.

Integration with other systems

The business test must be applied to the technology decision. Integration is expensive and slows things down. The disadvantage of failing to integrate is re-keying effort with associated errors.

The correct decision to make estimates the cost of integration versus the additional running cost of not integrating. The best solution for start up ecommerce sites is probably to not integrate but make sure that the software purchased is capable of interfacing long-term from the product or stock file of any existing systems and to the order processing system which is used at the present.