Whitehatmedia News

28/09/2004  |  Is it worth having a shop on my website?

If you have products to sell is it worth having a shop or best just to use the site to encourage people to contact you directly? There is no question that to set up a shop properly can be time consuming and complex and so it is briefly worth looking at what is really involved.

If you've set about setting up an online shop from scratch then you probably know all the pitfalls already and don't need to be reading this. On the other hand if you haven't done so yet then it's worth taking a deep breath and carefully considering the whole subject.

The first thing that it is important to emphasise if you are going to set up a shop is that it is done properly. If a customers try to buy off your site and fail or have problems it is probable that they will never return. The disaster that was Boo found this out to their costs and even when Sainsbury's originally launched their first online store, they were criticised for having a difficult interface. Now it's all resolved of course but it is probably that they suffered because of it.

If you are a large organisation then there will be many issues to consider and it is worth spending some time thinking about these. Many of these will concern integrating your online shop with the current sales process and stock control systems and it is important to build a platform that is future proof and will not have to be constantly changed.

But for smaller businesses the planning of an online shop is also important. Product ranges must be decided as well as prices and carriage. There are issues of sending goods across borders as well as those of VAT when selling to other nationalities. Returns policies have to be decided and posted and these must come within the law. Fraud has to be protected against.

There are some Internet Providers who offer quick solutions to setting up an online shop but in the main these are limited in their scope.

If you are a smaller or medium sized business there are some excellent software packages available for building a shop. The best known is probably Actinic which offers a superb range of features is relatively easy to setup and get running. It costs a few hundred pounds but there is also a freeware option, OSCommerce. Either way it is recommended that you get people who know what they're doing to implement the shop.

Getting a Merchants id for online trading can be a nightmare. All the major clearing banks offer this and in some cases you have to provide them with a large amount of information including a detailed business plan. The process can be tortuous and can takes weeks to complete. We would recommend using a dedicated service such as Worldpay. Worldpay offer a range of products for ecommerce back end processing, their charges are transparent and it is possible to set up a Worldpay account in a few days.

When building a shop it is important to make the buying process as easy as possible. There should be good online support including telephone numbers available.

The shop should be tested, tested and then tested again. It is vital that when the shop goes live it works properly and well. As a developer of online shops we have seen numerous examples where this hasn't been the case.

Having built the online shop it's then important to market it properly but that's a subject for another article.

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