Suggestions for creation and implementation of an e-commerce site

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These are my suggestion for creation and implementation of an e-commerce site. But before we get into this, here are a few questions to figure out how far along you are in the e-commerce process.

1. Do you have an existing website?
2. Do you have a domain name?
3. Do you have hosting for your website yet?
4. How were you planning on adding the products to your website?
5. Who will be adding products to you website?
6. What type of site will this be?
7. What shall you be selling?
8. Are the items to be sold in your current possesion, similar to a brick and mortar or is this an idea for how to sell a particular item? Please be as explanatory as possible.
9. How will you be handling returns?
10. Are there any types of reports you would like to retain for the nice IRS?
11. How do you plan on receiving payments?
12. Do you have or want a merchant license or would PayPal payments suffice? The cost difference is around $50 – $400.
13. Would you like to pay for a shopping cart or would you rather get the site up for as little and as fast as possible?
14. Send me links to sites that have some commonality with your site.
15. Send me links to sites you like.
16. Do you have marketing materials?
17. Who is your target audience?
18. How much of the design is ready?
19. Do you have a logo?
20. Do you have photos of the items readily available?

Whew. That’s a lot of questions but I want to make sure we don’t miss anything regarding commerce and we are all on the same page. In fact I’ve probably missed a few important items, but for now this will do.

Let me explain a little regarding these questions. I’m not trying to overwhelm anyone but all need to have an accurate representation of what will be involved because few people know what it takes to get a successful selling site up and running.

You see, Sears is a brick and mortar, much like painters. They own items, they sell items and have quantities of each items they sell. Sears has stores. on the other hand we have the painter who opens his closet and lets you sells his work. Then on our third hand are sites such as Autotrader or Ebay which are just brokerage firms. They sell the service that sells items they do not own. So basically it’s just an idea on how to sell an item with their own type or programming. Their revenue comes from a commission base as well as advertising and upselling products. Their hook is that they give you plenty of free items, and then at the end use bold words to emphasize something and charge you for it, similar to how newspapers do it.

Now we, as retailers, usually come up with ideas on how to sell items. There are two ways of getting something sold, you market it, or you put it in a window and hope someone wants to buy it. Usually everyone thinks that the best way to accomplish anything is going the least expensive route. Unfortunately the least expensive way to sell an item may be different than how you are expecting to sell the actual products. Though it will produce the same result, money in your pocket, it just does it with more steps and depending on what type of software or service you use, some sites need a LOT of maintenance which can be time consuming. But even worse is when you have a ‘return’ on an item and you find out that life selling items has its ups and downs and your software -well it may not have kept the best records. So let’s look at the ‘secured’ way and the ‘I want my site up yesterday’ way.

Decision HTTPS
So we decide, yes I want to have the most secured website regardless of cost. I want to control authorizations. I want to confirm the payment is in my account today. Well then you need to go to a website similar to Authorize.net and find a Web Merchant style account where credit cards can get processed and money can get deposited straight into your bank. Here’s a link to Authorize.net web page with that information. There will be a monthly cost to set up this type of processing. Usually the least costly is $25 monthly just for the processing. Then they will inform you of what and how they shall want your website hosting to be set up. This means you’ll probably need a static IP = $60+ monthly, possibly a dedicated server = $60+ monthly, plus a generated Key, plus an SSL license = $60min yearly and HTTPS service to say the least. These costs can add to your bottomline a minimum of $400 and depending on whom is hosting your website, how much diskspace is requred for your products and other variables, it will probably be higher. But if you go with a reputable site you’ll be ok. But this will cost way more money. You may know the reputable sites because they cost a lot more. If you have any doubt, send me a link and I’ll give you my opinion if the site is any good.

Decision HTTP & PayPal
If you are like myself, you want something up fast, convenient and that works and after you get your 40th customer you may consider upgrading your service to a “Dedicated Server”. But you probably won’t. You may want to tread this way in order to test the waters. This way you can see how much time you really are going to invest adding all your products to your website, updating their prices, adding descriptions and tags, adding similar items to each, creating special sets and handling your sales. Wow. You have a lot of time on your hands. But then again you want to test the waters. You may also not want to spend money on shopping cart everytime you get an idea but you still want to create an e-commerce site for each of your ideas to see which one works. Ahhh, you’re a brave soul. A ‘Luchador”! If this is the case then my recommendation is to open an account at PayPal.com. Link this account to a bank account. PayPal offers free deposits into your account within 3-4 days of payment and ‘most’ free PHP shopping carts process payments using PayPal. The downside is that ‘sometimes’ these ‘free’ sites get the shit hacked out of them. This happens ESPECIALLY if your web administrator setting up your website doesn’t tighten up every security aspect that’s written on blogs, forums, support sites or in the handbook that came with your software.

Luckily we’ve dabbled with a variety of shopping carts and we use CubeCart because of it’s easy setup and CubeCart’s ability to process payments directly into PayPal. But there are other free online shopping carts available as well.

How to proceed if you actually wanted someone like me to put your site together
First you answer all the questions above as well as you can. Then I collect a deposit of $300. I will accept payment via PayPal and will not proceed until the money is deposited. With this deposit, and some design questions answered, I will design a look for your site and send it as a sexy high resolution JPG or PNG. If the design does not work for you, we’ll work on what needs to get corrected, but I only redesign a maximum of 3 times. Redesign meaning, complete overhaul. You can nickpick here and there but be kind…. Once the site design is approved we go to the next phase, implementing the design to the e-commerce site. Then, after this is done, we go into testing mode. This is where we try and break/hack/destroy the site prior to it going live and making sure it’s user-friendly enough. Afterwards I explain how you can place products or make changes to products from the adminstration portion of the site.

At this point I start charging you more, I mean I’m tired just reading how much work I have to do and I’ll probably want to collect ten thousand dollars from you or a commission on every item sold. You’ll probably want me to get a commission…

If you already have a look for the site, feel free to send it and then I’ll fix it, turning it into a usable site for a plethora of audiences.

Now the fun part. Here are some useful links for hosting and shopping carts that you should now review.

Hosting for you website
http://www.dreamhost.com/shared/comparison.html

Shopping carts
SunShop – $159
http://www.turnkeywebtools.com/
This shopping cart possess restrictions upon how the domain hosting will be handled.

CubeCart – Free
http://www.cubecart.com

I hope this information was useful and as always I hope you found this information rewarding for developing, or starting to develop a fully functional e-commerce website that will make you gazillions.

Yours Truly,
Zeus Perez

— Zeus ::)
May 25, 2007

   

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