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Planning an ecommerce web site is like building a house – design and budget need to be agreed before the decoration.
AN AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION MUST BE DRAWN UP AS THE FIRST STAGE BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE IS DONE – ANY OTHER APPROACH WILL ONLY LEAD TO CONFUSION AND WORSE.
Once an AGREED REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION has been agreed then solutions need to be evaluated and costed against that specification are:
- Project management
- Hardware
- Net style and software
- Site selling
- Project management:
All aspects of the project would like to be managed. Decide who is going to try to to it and properly set up the requirements, activities, outcomes, milestones and timings.
Hardware:
Your decisions here are a managed service or your own server. The safety and disaster recovery facet that's achieved by hosting with a major provider is terribly important. Only go with your own server if you have got the experience and facilities.
Style and Software:
Website style
Develop site templates and check them with real people. They need to be straightforward to use and navigate. Don't let "design" drive the positioning; let ease of use and sales drive the "design". Suppose how the customer thinks.
Software
A minimum of five solutions need to be considered.
- Updating
- Shopping cart
- Forum
- Email
- Statistics
Updating
There are two realistic routes here. Either an on-line or an offline, PC based content management system (CMS). The web CMS will be either an Open Supply CMS (Open Source means that any application that has been created available, usually free, to developers to read and modify freely. Samples of Open Supply applications are MySQL and PHP) or commercial.
There are pros and cons to both routes. An online system is available to anyone with relevant security clearance anywhere any time. A PC based system is, clearly, restricted to the PCs running the licenses. An example of a PC based mostly system is Macromedia Contribute that integrates with Dreamweaver. There are a whole vary of online Industrial and Open Supply choices like SuiteWise™, Drupal, Joomla, and Website Baker etc. However, even this is often complicated by the fact that a number of the shopping cart solutions conjointly contain CMS which will be sufficient for many corporations’ requirements.
Shopping cart and CRM
There are a pair of realistic routes for the looking cart – Open Source or commercial.
There are wonderful Open Source searching carts such as OSCommerce and Zen, but also wonderful business solutions like Actinic and Client Focus Quick Order Portal (that comes with a whole CMS).
There are more factors to consider with the looking cart:
- Will it have its own or does it easily integrate with your exiting stock control systems?
- Does it integrate simply with accounting systems (e.g. Sage, QuickBooks)?
- Will it have or integrate easily with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that will be proposed in future?
Forum
Many CMS have good integrated forums however if they are doing not our recommendation would be to use a good Open Source package such as PunBB or phpBB. They're free, strong and straightforward to integrate and customise into any site.
Email
Most CMS, shopping carts and forums have email solutions. But, some solutions are terribly basic. If the chosen searching cart resolution that best meets the ecommerce and alternative necessities will not have a good integrated email resolution and if the same be true of the CMS and forum solutions then stand alone Open Source applications like PHPlist are one different solution and the other is an on-line resolution like Constant Contact or many others.
Statistics
This is arguably the foremost vital half of the package. If you do not recognize how visitors to your web site and in the look are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it's far, way tougher to enhance sales and web site profitability. Business applications like WebTrends and ClickTracks would like to be evaluated for best fit.
SITE MARKETING
There are 4 major areas to consider here.
- Offline marketing – e.g. in-store. What works most price effectively to drive traffic and orders via the web from non-internet activities.
- Web site optimisation – how to make sure technical structure, copy, content, back-links and a vary of other factors are initially and stay optimised thus that as many high search engine placements on relevant searches are obtained.
- Pay per click and different on-line promoting – how to get traffic from advertising against key words and phrases utilized in search engines and from adverts on different sites.
- Email – a way to grow the e-mail list and use it to grow profitable sales.
In outline:
- Manage the project
- Suppose how the client thinks
- Get excellent software to create finding product and worth simple
- Create terms clear and payment simple
- Guarantee you're in stock and and have achievable delivery timescales
- Create positive you have a smart CRM system and clear communications – mail, phone, emai
- Market the location appropriately
- Know what's going on – use your stats to test, track and strive
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