Want an E-Commerce site? With entry costs / barriers falling all the time more and more SME’s want to enter the market.
Be careful, there are hundreds of people who will take your money in return for an all singing all dancing site, myself included 
but, without careful planning it will be nothing but a white elephant.
To sell online you need to compete in one of two areas
- Price, you need to be significantly cheaper than the high street (and competitive with other online retailers)
- Niche, you need to offer products not easily available on the high street, i.e. become a specialist
If you cannot compete strongly in one of these areas, forget it.
Then you need a marketing strategy, do not underestimate the cost and difficulty of this exercise. You will need both an online and offline marketing strategy, both of which can be expensive.
Both on and offline you will need to consider advertising costs in magazines, on websites or using technologies such as Adwords.
An online store is not like a physical shop, there is no ‘passing trade’, it is an extremely competitive industry and good search engine rankings are difficult to achieve, and take time to establish.
You need to consider payment gateways, on this note never store customers credit card details on your site (which a lot of open source applications have the facility to do). To store credit card details you really need to employ a security specialist, and if your reading this, the chances are you cannot afford one.
A famous example of what happens when you store credit card details on a site is a story of Playboy dot Com, whose customers received an E-Mail, containing their personal details and credit card number, informing them that the aforementioned credit card details were circulating the criminal underworld, and making some useful suggestions on how Playboy dot Com could improve their security :-).
A stunt like that would put most companies out of business.
In a nutshell, if you store credit card numbers on your site you will become a target for hackers, and they are good, way ahead of most of the people deploying E-Commerce sites, so leave that side of things to the professionals running payment gateways (Protx is a good one in the UK).
Then you need to consider shipping costs and packaging, what shipping options you will make available to customers. Most couriers factor weight and size into their shipping costs. This means knowing what your products and packaging weigh, and in some cases the volume too.
You need professional images of all your products, not a good photographer, find out how much that will cost too. There is little point in putting up a nice site if the images are poor.
Consider the time it will take to load (with the weight and shipping options), describe and price your products. It is not sufficient to give a brief description.
- You need to explain products properly to customers
- Google will not rank your site well if it has poor product descriptions
If you have an existing retail business, you need to reconcile your on and offline sales / stock. Integrating offline systems with your online store can be difficult, and consequently expensive. The alternative is to manually reconcile the systems, i.e. run two stock figures and keep jumping between them to keep them the same. Your online customer will not be happy if you have to mail them to say ‘I just sold my last one in the shop today’.
I think that’s enough for the time being, there is a lot more which I will post shortly…