A Guide to Ecommerce for Small Business

Date: January 11, 2008 | Author: Clive Walker | Category: Business

[from a web designer’s perspective]

CVW Web Design is a web design and development company based in West Sussex, UK.

If you are a small business that wants to sell items online, it can be quite daunting trying to decide how to implement a website with ecommerce facilities. Every web designer that you approach will have an ecommerce website solution that they promote. However, the first thing to consider is not what web design company to use or which ecommerce website software. One of the most important questions you should ask is whether you have the resources to commit to an ecommerce website or online shop….

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to scare you off! However, you will need to put some time and effort into managing an online shop. Someone in your business will need to view orders, read and send emails, and, in many cases, send out the purchased items. You and/or your web designer/developer will need to add and amend product information when the website is online. It’s not simply a case of creating an ecommerce website and then sitting back with your feet up whilst sales roll in. These days, an ecommerce website or online shop is another part of your business and you will need to work at it like any other part of your business …. and on a continual basis.

Now that I have got that off my chest, let’s get on with the rest of this article! Assuming you have decided that an ecommerce website is the way forward, how do you decide the best ecommerce solution? I hope that this article will provide some useful information for you.

One question to ask at an early stage is what level of ecommerce do you need? If you have a single item to sell, you may not need a full-blown ecommerce system. For example, the payment bureau PayPal provides a service that makes it easy for any competent web designer/developer to add a Buy Now button to any website. The button sends the item and payment details to PayPal where the customer can pay with their credit/debit card. All payments are taken on the PayPal website and PayPal will charge between 3% and 4% of the transaction value for this service.

For most online stores, you are likely to need an ecommerce system that is capable of providing a greater degree of product organisation and management, and the ability to buy multiple items, than the single button PayPal method. In these circumstances, you will need an ecommerce website that uses a database to store the product information. The website and database will also enable the products to be organised into categories and store customer and order information. Any ecommerce website solution will do this but it’s often difficult to choose between them. I suggest that the following are important considerations.

The Web Designer

Your web designer/developer will be critically important in all of this because they will be advising you, designing and implementing the website, and will be your point of contact for help and website support after the website goes live. Therefore, it’s important that you trust them, find them easy to talk to, and know that you will be able to work with them for a period of time.

The Website Cost

From my perspective, it would be nice to think that every client has a large budget! However, in the real world, there will be a finite budget and the ecommerce website will have to provide value for money and fit into the budget. It’s also important that the website client has a realistic budget. Sorry, but you will not get a viable ecommerce website off the ground with a budget of a few hundred pounds.

These are the costs that you will need to allow for in an ecommerce website budget:

  • The ecommerce software
  • The web designer’s time
  • Web hosting
  • Payment provider’s costs
  • Domain name purchase
  • Bank charges

And here’s my assessment of these costs:

  • Ecommerce software £100
  • Web designer’s time - between 3 and 10 days work
  • Web hosting - typically £20/month
  • Payment provider’s costs - typically £20/month, for example Protx
  • Domain name purchase - £10 to £30
  • Your bank charges will be variable depending on the bank and the credit card facilities that you use.

Realistically, this means that an ecommerce website will cost approximately £1000 - £2500 to set-up and £40/month thereafter. It is important to say that this price is not fixed in stone but the web costs, for instance, are what I would charge for an ecommerce website containing hundreds of products. If you have millions of products, then that’s a different story…

It is likely that the quotes you receive will vary quite considerably because every web design company will have a different way of charging for their work. In this article, I’m just saying what I would expect to charge for an ecommerce website for a small business in the UK.

The Ecommerce Software

The ecommerce software provides the shop functionality for your website. A web design company will promote their favourite software [just like I am doing here, ahem].

There are many ways of providing an ecommerce website ranging from a simple PayPal button through to a completely custom-built solution that will cost several thousand pounds/dollars.

The software that we use is somewhere between those extremes. After installation, it provides a ready-made ecommerce website ‘out-of-the-box’. I often think of this as an ecommerce website framework. However, in most cases there will also be several days work to customise the website to the business owner’s requirements (see this ecommerce case study). The customisation is in two parts. The design of the website or ‘what it looks like’ and the functionality of the website or ‘how it works’.

In my experience, perhaps surprisingly, the functionality customisation is an area that is sometimes overlooked by businesses because it can be difficult to assess at the start of any project. However, although you would not expect every ecommerce solution to be completely customisable, you will need to have the ability to ‘turn on’ and ‘turn off’ various features and/or adapt the software to your needs. The software we use allows for extensive customisability within the framework provided. For example, the calculation of shipping or postage costs will usually be different for every online shop and the ecommerce software will need to provide alternative methods for this and/or allow different postages to be set for each product/country/shipping method.

The ecommerce software we use is provided by EcommerceTemplates. Alternatively, our own website explains more about ecommerce web templates from our perspective. Overall, we believe that this solution provides extensive functionality and is great value for money. The software is under continual development by the original developers. There are also many third-party developers who have extended the software to provide additional functionality that is integrated with the original framework.

As an ecommerce website owner, you may not want to know some of the technical aspects of the website design. That’s fine. However, you will need to be able to administer the website/shop after the website is live and it’s important that you or someone in your organisation is comfortable with this. Most ecommerce websites will come with an administration control panel that enables you to manage the website and the customer’s orders. Ask your web designer/developer to run you though some of the key admin features so that you can see what is involved, before you commit to the website project.

Additional Considerations

There are many other factors that can come into play with any ecommerce website project, including web accessibility and web marketing. It’s probably beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about these. However, with regard to web accessibility, I would make one point. As a web developer, I am always aiming to satisfy a core level of web accessibility with any web project but I also realise that a small business ecommerce website that uses an off-the-shelf product will probably not be able to satisfy all web accessibility criteria. The ecommerce solution we use has been continually developed over recent years and our current websites using the software provide better accessibility than some other larger, more well-known, online retailers.

An in-depth accessibility assessment requires expert advice and is not always within budget. A small business ecommerce website may need to compromise here.

Good luck with your online shop!

Thanks for reading.