Planning

It pays to spend time in planning your ecommerce approach before embarking on the development of your site.

Firstly, you should consider whether your business is appropriate for selling online. This is covered in more detail in ‘Will your business fly online’.

Secondly, what are the objectives for the site? Are you looking to generating new customer prospects and new sales, improve customer service or build relationships with existing customers. Deciding on these will determine the contents and the structure of your site.

And thirdly, its worth asking yourself a number of questions to enable you or your web designer to decide on an appropriate software solution.

The Online Catalogue

• How many products do you plan to sell on-line?
• Are products distinct, or do they have options? For example, does one product consist of several others? Are there accessories and can one product be substituted for another?
• How frequently do you add or remove products from the catalogue - and how often do you change prices?

Visitors and Orders

• Who do you expect at your site - existing customers, new customers or a small, closed community?
• How many customers do you expect to visit per day and how many orders do you expect to take?

Pricing and Payment

• Is there one price per product or do you charge differently based upon the type and status of the customer? Are there different prices for different order quantities?
• How do you charge for shipping?
• What are your payment options? If on-line credit-card processing is important how will you select a payment service provider?

General

• Do you need to integrate into any back-end systems such as accounting systems, order processing or stock management?
• Do you plan to sell overseas, and if so to which countries? VAT is not payable on exports outside the EU.

Watch a video below from Chris Barling, chairman of Actinic who talks about setting up an ecommerce site.