Tips for Cutting Edge eCommerce
eCommerce is the technology that allows for the exchange of currency for goods and services online. If you don’t know about ecommerce already, welcome to the 1990’s! Since ecommerce makes money, it often costs money to set up… a lot of money! I wanted to weigh in with some advice for businesses that require, or at least are venturing into the world of ecommerce. I also wanted to suggest some intermediate solutions if you’re not quite ready for the plunge, as well as what I consider the best open source solutions for ecommerce.
eCommerce and Its Evolving Philosophy
As I’ve observed a ton of shopping cart-driven sites and have perused and experimented with various open source ecommerce platforms, I’ve become increasingly aware of the emphasis on the technology, the functionality required to make it all work effectively. Aesthetics have been secondary to feature sets. In other words, business have been able to sell online, but it normally doesn’t look good. It think that’s changing, and I think it’s a good thing.
As a matter of fact, I hope that the technology of ecommerce will soon evolve into an outright artform. I used to work in a Christian bookstore and we moved the entire store a few blocks down the street to a larger building. The manager and department leaders were arranging displays near the front of the store in the most random order. Order, in fact, was what was missing. Upon walking in the door, you were confronted with an obstacle course of knick-knacks, greeting cards, and gift items. The books that the bookstore sold were near the back.
Upon questioning the reasoning behind the odd arrangement, I learned a basic retail truth. You’re not in business simply to make products available and easy to find. You’re in business to invite customers into a shopping experience in which you sell them products they may not have been thinking about before walking in the door. So you make them weave their way through your best stuff on the way to the least profitable merchandise - the books.
The historic problem with ecommerce is that we’ve taken brick-and-mortar retail establishments and have simply added the functionality of selling online. That is, we’ve made products available for purchase online. This is an okay strategy when we’re first discovering new technologies, but in the long run, we need to be thinking more about how we’re going to invite online customers into a shopping experience in which we package, display, and sell a product they weren’t thinking of before logging on.
We’ve bought into the idea that price, availability, and shipping time and costs are the only factors that matter to online shoppers. But with the ever-merging worlds of online and brick-and-mortar trade, the same thinking patterns that affect purchasing decisions in the real world will affect buying on the world wide web as well. So how do we really sell online?
I want to state one simple point about ecommerce… design matters. That’s the revolution I think needs to take place. And I’m not simply referring to a nice graphical layout. Any web designer worth his salt understands that graphics and layout are only the introduction to field. We need to be thinking in terms of usability (how easy it is for a person to navigate), packaging (no awful and sometimes dangerous plastics are needed for display), accessibility, and definitely aesthetics.
So I’m making a case that an online store that looks good, markets itself well, and fights for good search engine rankings will compete successfully against online shops that are highly-functional but graphically behind the times. This is why I’d love to bite into a significantly sized ecommerce development project. (If you’re in need, contact me.)
Light to Intermediate eCommerce Solutions
If you’re not quite ready for a custom ecommerce solution, you can certainly try selling through eBay, Amazon, or another third-party goods handler. They can handle a variety of needs, from the exchange of funds to shipping and fulfillment. There’s also a great intermmediate solution in e-Junkie, which allows you to set up a great-looking and simple shopping cart in the environment of your own site.
There are also some great open source shopping cart scripts that allow you to have the functionality of a shopping cart, then add your own design. My favorite, so far, is Magento because of it’s awesome design and user interface. There is also OpenCart, ZenCart, and CReloaded, plus potentially thousands of others - these just happen to be some of the most popular.
None of these solutions offer a simple three-step process. eCommerce continues to be a difficult-to-manage technology. You must install a cart or program one yourself, design the user interface, learn the backend, and you’ll always be creating products, managing your inventory, shipping and handling, and scouring through sales reports and figures.
More stuff will be sold online as time goes on, but it’s not always the quick fix that people assume it is. The 1990’s taught us that harsh lesson with the dot-com boom/bust. We have a lot to learn and enless opportunities to explore!
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Filed Under: Advice For Businesses, Recommended Resources