E-Commerce: Cart or Horse

I believe in e-commerce. Meaning, I believe that people can succeed in selling a product or service online. In fact, I have seen in work – even for products that were invented in garages.

But I also know that having a successful e-commerce venture requires a lot of preparation on the part of the merchant.

You can have a spectacular product – so mind-blowing that people are knocking down your door to buy it – but if your website isn’t working and your business isn’t streamlined, you will struggle.  You know that phrase, “Don’t put the cart before the horse?” It resonates when you are planning an online store.

So let’s put our business hats on and go through a checklist of some things you need to think about before launching your new e-commerce website.

1. Your e-commerce website will be a new leg of your business.

If you are running a retail storefront, you are used to certain processes, certain payment systems, certain vendor situations, certain employee tasks. All of this is reinvented when you start talking about the Web. For example, you probably can’t use that POS system (point of sale) you are using, or the old cash register in the store to run credit card transactions from the web. Sometimes these decisions are easy, and sometimes they require more planning. Make a list of all the vendors you use that relate to your normal store operations and order fulfillment; mention those to your web development provider and be ready to have discussions with some of those vendors also.

2. Who is responsible and who will be fulfilling orders.

If your employees are busy stocking shelves or waiting on customers, who are going to check and fulfill the online orders? Sometimes you can reposition an employee to handle online orders along with their normal everyday tasks, but if you expect a high volume of online sales you might need a dedicated customer service person to handle that. The accounting department needs to understand the new invoice and order payment structure so their books stay clean, while your shipping and receiving department needs to receive a copy of the order that they can understand and fulfill.

3. Shipping providers and rates.

If you use a dedicated shipping provider such as UPS or FedEx, or even US Postal Service (USPS), you are probably set up with an account and able to manage shipping rates through desktop software or local representative.

When it comes to reporting shipping rates with a website, there are some different requirements. Providers like UPS require that you sign up with their “online tools” program – a basic extension of your UPS account that authorizes you to pull rates from their online servers. Your local UPS account rep can help you get the online account started. Once they do, connect them with your web developer or forward your web developer the UPS account information you were provided. That information needs to be integrated with your shopping cart software (the software used to build and operate your e-commerce website). When working properly, that will allow the website to “talk” to your shipping provider (in this case UPS) to query shipping rates based on weight and zip code (or area).

3.b. By the way – did you weigh your products?

There are many different ways to charge shipping.  But if you plan to use a real-time accurate shipping rate from a provider like USPS or UPS, you will need to enter weight values for each product on your website. These providers base their quotes on weight (as well as shipping region).  If you are selling virtual products or services that do not need shipping, those can be handled in a different way. Discuss these options with your web developer.

4. Online credit card payments.

If your business has never taken credit cards before, you will need to seek a Merchant Service Provider – basically, a company that specializes in offering credit card transaction services, both offline and online. I recommend that you interview at least a couple to compare rates and services and ask people you trust for referrals – don’t just ask your bank because they are your bank. There are many quality providers, both large and small. Be sure to inform them that you will need to accept online payments for the new website.

If you are an established merchant who has been accepting credit cards, try consulting your current merchant service provider first and see what it takes to extend your account with an online gateway. The “payment gateway” is basically a communication tool that delivers transaction info from your website to the processor and tells the website if the charge is successful or declined.  Consult with your website developer about preferred gateways that are easy to work with or compatible with your shopping cart solution. Authorize.net is a popular choice because it is the leading provider and supported by most institutions; it is also commonly compatible with most e-commerce software.

5. Give yourself time to compile your product information.

At some point during the setup of your online store, your products will need to be entered or imported into the website. Each product includes many fields (maybe more than you realized) and you might need time to gather all that info.

I usually recommend preparing a spreadsheet and entering all of your products there, so they can eventually be imported into the database. When I develop e-commerce websites, I usually give my client a sample spreadsheet format, based on a file exported from the shopping cart’s standard database. This helps them input the information in a format that is compatible with the shopping cart database.

The minimum fields you can expect are product name, short description (teaser), long description, the main product image, sometimes an additional thumbnail image, the selling price, and SKU (product code). There are several more fields but most of the time they have defaulted to a common setting or they are optional.

Your SKU is typically quite important because today’s e-commerce software usually relies on this number (or alphanumeric code) to identify each product in the database as a unique item.  So even if you do not use an SKU system in your retail shop, you still need to come up with some kind of unique code to represent each item on your webshop. This actually comes in handy later – because it helps you easily search for products on the website, on orders, and replace a product during an import update.

6. Plan to test, and test… and test.

During the development process, you will be involved in at least one or 2 test orders. This may go excellently the first time because all of the pieces are still in “test” mode.  But as soon as you enable the payment gateway in production (live) mode, or you are gearing up to be ready for a launch in 2 days, you need to run some real-world tests, too.

Be prepared to work closely with your e-commerce web developer to perform at least 1 test using a real credit card on the production-ready system. I typically set up a special test product for a small amount like $1.00 for this purpose. The client can run 1 or 2 successful tests to confirm things are working and save themselves a headache with an actual customer later.

If you can, invite some friends or customers to test the site as well. As long as you are not hitting the website excessively or ringing up charges with a payment system (be sure you are in test mode), it’s great to have more eyes.

If there is an error, your web development will help you to investigate and fix that. Sometimes it is easy to determine the problem by checking error logs generated by a payment gateway, but sometimes the error actually resides somewhere else. (I have experienced 2 cases on former projects where the actual merchant service account was set up incorrectly with the wrong “account type” and therefore it caused all transactions to decline; it can happen, but there is a process of elimination you can go through with your development team.)

Once the website is fully tested and things are looking just peachy – the website is ready to be scheduled for launch.

Do the questions stop there? No, of course not. You may discover some quirky issue that only one blue moon customer finds, or you might just forget how to change the price of a product.   Keep a good relationship with your web development team so you have that resource to turn to. I typically invite my clients to contact me for about the next month after a launch, because I know they will likely have a challenge or question in those first few weeks.