Ecommerce sites

Most ecommerce sites are easy to spot. Nobody doubts that the primary purpose of Amazon or Land’s End is to sell stuff. But many ecommerce sites sell only one or two products, or are designed mainly to capture leads so the site owner can sell folks on his/her goods or services down the road a bit.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll talk about your standard ecommerce storefront, with more than a few products. Assuming you don’t want your store to look like a cookie-cutter duplicate of everyone else’s, plan to spend a fair amount of money getting a storefront online.

Ecommerce sites are a headache. They take a lot of ongoing work to add and update products, keep track of inventory, and just keep them working. There will always be customers who can break your “foolproof” shopping cart.

The main goal of ecommerce is conversion. You don’t even need a whole lot of traffic, if a good number of your visitors buy something from you (or put their names on your email list).

The main issues in building and maintaining an ecommerce storefront:

• Uniqueness. Most products are available everywhere on the web these days. How will your store stand out? Hint: Forget about trying to compete on price.
• Security. Whenever there’s an exchange of money involved, security is a huge issue. For a start, you will need an SSL certificate to secure the checkout process, or you will need to link to a reputable payment processor (such as PayPal or Google Checkout). If you accept credit cards, you must be PCI compliant. You need to keep up with security patches and upgrades to the shopping cart.
• Ongoing maintenance and operations. How will customers get ahold of you? Running an ecommerce site by yourself means you either have to be personally available during business hours to answer emailed or phoned in questions and take orders, or hire someone to do it. You (or someone else) need to constantly update products. And ecommerce web design is not a “design it and forget about it” kind of project. You will need a web developer “on call,” someone to update the shopping cart software and fix glitches as needed.
• Navigation. People may be annoyed if they find it troublesome to navigate around an information site. But if they experience problems with ordering or a shopping cart, you’ve just lost a sale. Probably forever. Even more than other sites, ecommerce sites need to be intuitively designed and easy to navigate.