I often get requests for proposals from prospective clients regarding e-commerce or deal of the day sites. Many times these clients know that they want to create an online store but they haven’t really thought about the various requirements that they’ll have regarding how their site will be built. By sitting down and thinking through the various requirements or options they will need for their website, they can save themselves an immense amount of time and money when working with a designer. Below are just a few of the items for an e-commerce website that I generally work through with clients.
- Payment – How will the site accept payment? There are a variety of options: Paypal, Google Checkout, or Credit Card gateways like Authorize.net. There are pros and cons about each. Paypal and Google Checkout generally have lower fees for accepting payment but they often require that your customer have a Paypal or Google account to complete the transaction (Paypal allows customers to use credit cards if they don’t have a Paypal account, however). Accepting credit cards directly on your site is often the simplest method for your customers, but requires extra effort when building the site to integrate with the gateway, secure the transactions, and record orders. Credit card gateways often have a monthly gateway fee on-top of the per-transaction fee so they are often more costly than simply using Paypal or Google Checkout.
- Shipping – How will you ship your products and charge your customers for shipping. I’ve generally seen a variety of methods of dealing with this issue. Some sites charge a flat rate per item for shipping. This is the simplest method but can often lead to inacurate shipping charges (the customer is either over-charged or under-charged for the actual shipping charge). Other sites charge a rate based on the item’s weight and the shipping destination. This is more accurate, but requires that you weigh each item you plan on selling and be able to store that weight on each item for your checkout process. Additionally, you need to think about who you want to use to ship your packages. Do you want to use USPS, UPS, DHL, or FedEx? Do you want to provide a real-time shipping calculator for each service on your site so that customers can determine their actual shipping charges when they checkout? All of these things need to be planned so that the designer building your site can correctly implement the shipping process for your site.
- Communicating with Customers – How will you communicate with your customers? At a minimum, you should always send the customer an email when the order was placed. However, you may also want to send additional emails when their order has shipped. Also, will you want to provide your customers with an option to sign up for special offers? This requires some extra functionality for your site that keeps track of customers who are signed up for your special offers and their email address and also provides you with a way to send out a bulk email.
- Order Processing - When you process orders, what pieces will you want to automate? Do you need to integrate your orders with QuickBooks? Do you want to be able to print shipping invoices automatically for each order? Do you want to automatically send your customers their tracking number when their order has been scheduled to ship? Do you want to be able to issue refunds through your website? All of these are features that clients often over-look but could make their lives much easier when it comes to processing orders from their online store.
- Organization of the Products – Many clients know that they want to provide items in their store, but they’ve not thought about how they should be organized. There are many questions you should ask yourself: Will I want to feature certain products in certain areas on the website? Will I need product categories and sub-categories? If an item is out of stock, do I want to continue to offer it on the site and fill the order when the item comes back in stock? Do I want to schedule sales on certain items or categories? All of these questions, if answered before construction on your website has started, will help you get a more robust and reliable site. Modifying your site after it has gone life in order to add one of these features is always possible, but can lead to bugs or broken functionality.
These are just a few things to think about when building an e-commerce store. Generally, the more thought you put into your site, the better your experience will be. I always encourage clients to put together a thorough request for proposal. This has two major benefits: 1) it enables you to get accurate estimates from various web designers (and be able to hold them to the estimate when they later balk at adding functionality) and 2) it gives you a good vision of what you expect your site to do when it eventually goes live.
If you are interested in an online store or daily deal website, please contact us through our contact form about your project. We’d be happy to answer any of your questions and provide you with an accurate estimate of how long it would take and how much it would cost to build your website.
