E-commerce is an exciting venture, but how exactly do you begin on the journey to online success? Follow these 5 steps for smart e-commerce business owners.
1. Prepare the product database.
Your web developer’s masterful web design skills can only take you so far – you need products to populate the shopping cart. Start by preparing a spreadsheet of products broken down by category. The spreadsheet will help organize all the data you will need to eventually enter into the shopping cart software. You will need to include fields such as product title, price, short description, and a longer description. If you will be shipping items, you may also want to include the weight of each product in your spreadsheet. Ask your web development company if it is possible to get a copy of an exported product file as an example you can follow. Last but not least, prepare a collection of images for your products and include the file name of the appropriate image with each product in your spreadsheet.
2. Get online payment services.
To sell products successfully online, you need a method of accepting payments. This usually leads to two roads: merchant services, or a standard PayPal account.
Merchant banking services actually involve multiple parties and can be quite confusing for new business owners. A good approach is to talk with a local financial institution you trust about merchant service options and what extended options they recommend for online payments. Online transactions differ from “card is present” transactions, where a credit card is physically being scanned at a storefront. The risk of online transactions is perceived as a greater risk and therefore managed differently with different rates and fees. A good banking partner can explain these details to you. When you determine the right financial partner for you, you will need to add a payment gateway service to your account. This is a software service – the middleware between the website and the bank account. The most popular gateway today is Authorize.net, and most providers offer this option. The setup fee and monthly fee for the service can vary. This entire process involves paperwork and approvals with the bank and could take several days or weeks. I always encourage business owners to start the process early, so it is all ready to plugin before the website launch date.
If you are testing the market or unsure about the best payment service, you might decide to start with a basic PayPal service. PayPal offers several options including full merchant banking solutions, but their basic business “express payments” account is more easily set up and plugged into a shopping cart. The account is free to set up (as of the date of this post) and only takes a few minutes to kick off. It may take a few days to verify the account by connecting it to the bank account where you want the payments deposited. Many shopping cart programs are already equipped with a compatible module for PayPal, which makes the developer’s job a bit easier. But you might suffer a bit on the financial side with less attractive rates and a less attractive customer experience for your shoppers.
3. Determine shipping methods.
If you will be selling tangible products, like shirts, you probably need to use a shipping service to send them to the customer. There are several options for shipping services, and you may even offer more than one option to your shoppers. For example, you might offer both USPS and FedEx expedited options during checkout, and allow the customer to choose their preference. Evaluate your shipping options and determine the rates you want to charge. Consider the whole customer experience, including any special discounted shipping or free shipping offers you plan to provide. There are various models for charging shipping, such as flat rate shipping, table rate shipping (a table of different rates depending on quantity or price points), and weight-based programs (USPS, UPS, FedEx).
4. Write policies.
Today’s standards require certain policies to be present on your website, defining procedures and the responsibilities of your business and your shoppers. Payment service providers also require these policies to be represented on your website. It might be acceptable to simply have a web page describing the policies and link to them in the footer of your website, or you may require customers to acknowledge the policies during checkout. These policies usually include a privacy policy, terms, and conditions of service agreement, and return policy.
5. Train the fulfillment team.
The best e-commerce website won’t be successful without good fulfillment. It is important that you maintain a good customer experience with the delivery of your product to the buyer and with continued customer support. Prepare a plan for the process of fulfilling orders and simulate the process of receiving a new order. I strongly encourage e-commerce website owners to do real-world test orders before launching their website to the public, using their own valid credit card and watching the entire process of the checkout, email receipts and merchant notifications, invoicing, updating order statuses or internal records, confirming the payment went through, etc.
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Many thanks for your review of things, very interesting and useful article on e-commerce.
Following these tips and the additional guidelines discussed here will absolutely help anyone business thrive. Thank you so much for teaching us how to get ready for eCommerce business.