A simple idea – selling a million pixels on some specially commissioned drawings by political satirist Steve Bright; and in the process gathering messages from people who want to make a protest to the Labour Government. There’s some shopping to do as well!

Visitors to the site are invited to join the prisoners by purchasing a ‘hypothetical’ pixel and leaving their messages to Labour. Each message can be viewed on the site and form part of the tagclouds (which highlight the most important words from peoples’ messages), eventually to be delivered to No.10 a week before the next general election.

The idea was brought to us by David Barrett, an artist and very disappointed Labour supporter, who wanted an elegant structure and funky-yet-retro design for the website. The brief included an ecommerce element so that the ‘prisoners’ can buy hoodies and T shirts as easily as possible. We hope they reach their targets – so if you’re a disgruntled labour supporter, why not pop on over to Million Prisoners and do something about it!

1. Do your research and try to sell products that have a market and are in demand.
2. Set your prices as low as you can.
3. Market your business from the outset, don’t leave it until after your site has launched, and make sure you have a healthy marketing budget for at least the first year.
4. Do show photos of your products, and make sure they are good quality. If you have to get them done for you then so be it, people want to see what they are buying.
5. Use conventions. The Internet is beginning to establish ways of doing things that people are becoming used to. Ignoring those conventions will simply confuse people and reduce sales.
6. Make sure your site is text-based. Not only will this help your search engine profile, it makes your site more accessible to your customers. An ecommerce website is a business enterprise not a glory-box.
7. Make sure your customers can find your:
   • Terms and Conditions Policy
   • Delivery Policy
   • Returns Policy
   • Privacy and Security Policy
   • Contact Details with company registration number and other formal details.
8. Make sure your policies are clear, fair and easy to understand.
9. Always advertise your phone number, and always make sure someone answers calls. There is little that people hate more than being unable to speak to someone when they need to.
10. Provide FULL product information. You might think it’s a superfluous detail what sort of bulbs your new line of light-fittings works with, or what the power rating of your new line of kettles is, however your customers might not agree. You will lose sales by not giving people the information they need to make an informed purchase decision.
11. Be up-to-date. If your products go out of stock, either mark them as such or remove them from your site.
12. Provide a good search facility and make sure it is on EVERY page of your site. A good search facility gives a small number of appropriate results, not thousands of vague matches.
13. Keep It Simple (stupid). The KISS principle is absolutely fundamental to good web design (ecommerce is web design, sort of). Use familiar terms and conventions wherever possible. Make sure a five year old could add products to his basket, and do the other things you want him to do.

Top tips for alienating people and loosing business

The following will all stop people doing business with you. (Caution may contain sarcasm.)

• Use a splash (introduction) page, any size will do, even a quick-loading one.
• Use images for important elements like navigation elements. This is especially effective for when you don’t want people to get around your site and find your products.
• Use Flash animations. Particularly effective at alienating people when used for navigation elements. They are also great for destroying your search engine profile. You can use them (solely) for advertising, if you really have to, remember that people particularly hate adverts in the middle of the screen.
• Use lots of advertising especially in the middle of the screen, in amongst your products is good. For extra effect you can try popup adverts which appear from nowhere and traverse the screen aiming to obscure information that someone might be reading.
• Break your promises. If you say you’ll deliver goods in 3 days, and then don’t, what’s the BIG PROBLEM?
• Send people unsolicited emails.
• Why not try asking people to ‘log in’ before you show them your products? This is a great way to winnow down your potential customer base. You will ensure that only the hardcore, dedicated or desperate stick around, and they’re always an easy sell.

Secure capture & swipe

This method is probably the most common, is the cheapest to you the retailer and works as follows:

Firstly, your ecommerce system stores your customers’ card details securely online, usually in a database used by the system. I most highly recommend that you ensure that the details are strongly encrypted whilst they are stored, your ecommerce provider will be able to reassure you in this respect and if they can’t, maybe think about getting another provider who understands the fundamental importance of basic security.

Secondly, either you log in to your ecommerce system online and use a secure online order system to view and process your orders, or, your ecommerce system will download your new orders to your desktop and you can process them there. Processing in this context means using your credit card facility. Obviously you need a credit card swiping facility to use this method, if you don’t have one your bank can help you set one up. Make sure to tell your bank you are taking payment this way, as some may not approve or may place restrictions on how you do it.

Real-time processing

Another widely used option is to process payments in real-time over the Internet using a ‘payment provider’. There are many providers, probably the most famous being Worldpay, but many high-street banks also offer this service (which may be why some of them are not keen on the Capture and Swipe method). To use a payment provider you pay a fee for using the service and you pay a commission for every transaction they process for you. Fees vary according to the volume of orders you place and, like a normal card-swiping facility, the fees get lower the higher your sales volume.

It is important to realise that these services do not actually take payment, they simply check that a set of card details are valid and that there are funds available for the transaction, they then pass these on to your online merchant account where the actual transaction takes place. Because of this you still need a merchant account (credit card processing) from your bank and many banks are reluctant to give these to startup businesses. However, this service is quick and the providers take care of everything for you so if your site is busy then it is probably the most efficient way for you to take payments.

Bureau services

As I said, you need a merchant account to use a normal payment provider service. If you don’t have a merchant account then most of the providers will offer you a bureau service whereby they complete the transaction for you. Obviously they charge extra for this service and frequently you might not receive your funds for several weeks. Unfortunately, because the banks are restrictive with merchant accounts, this is the service that many startup ecommerce businesses must use.

Paypal

Paypal is great! It is easy to set up and is a popular way, thanks to the success of Ebay, for money to move between people on the Internet. However, you couldn’t really rely on Paypal as your only means of taking payment because most people who use your shop probably will not have a Paypal account. You can offer Paypal as an option to your customers but you should also offer an alternative way to take payments.

Other things to consider

It can be a good idea to offer to keep your customers’ credit card details on record and create an alternative one or two-click ordering process for repeat or regular customers. This feature seems to increase sales for those shops that offer it probably because it makes paying quicker and easier. Obviously, your ecommerce system must support this feature.

You need to be careful with this feature though and go to some pains to ensure you are providing a safe environment to keep such sensitive information. You will increases trust and avoid problems with people not realising you are keeping their card details if you allow customers to opt-in, rather than to opt-out, of using this feature. A good way to allay further worries is to give full details of how you store private data and what you do with it. This shows you are a responsible company and, again, it has been shown to increase trust.

Firstly, learn the jargon: selling online, e-tailing (yuk), web and Internet stores – these are all the same thing, and are simply just different ways of saying “ecommerce”. Ecommerce is what you are doing when you sell something via the Internet, it’s that simple.

Next, go and read all the articles on this website about web marketing. You need to look into that before you start your ecommerce activities as your shop will sell nothing without customers and this HAS to be started at the same time you begin planning your ecommerce empire. Now, continue…

Bravado has no place in most businesses. You can’t know everything about everything, so if you know little or nothing about ecommerce, then that’s an important thing to know! Knowing that, you can do something about it – you can learn. Listen to the experiences of anyone you know who sells online already, search on the Internet and look at some of the website links on the right. Find out what you can about how ecommerce applies to your area of business and, perhaps most importantly, take a really good look at the businesses who are already selling your products and services online.

Innovation is a great aspiration but don’t get carried away with it. If you’ve got a great idea then there is a chance, albeit minuscule, that it is both original and viable, but there is a much greater chance that it is neither. Don’t try too hard to be different with your shop design or methods of selling, there are conventions online that customers are increasingly used to, so use them well and you will sell more.

This goes equally for the goods you want to sell. As a general rule, if what you sell is already being sold via mail order, then you probably have a viable ecommerce idea. If your goods are fixed price then even better. If though the products you are selling must be touched, tasted or smelt first, then your challenge is greater because as you must realise, customers can do none of these things via a computer (yet!). However, the success of online cosmetics, grocery and clothing stores demonstrates that even these barriers can be overcome.

Think about your prices. The Internet is associated with low-cost shopping and for good reason. The startup costs for an ecommerce business are usually at most 20% of the cost of setting up shop on a high street, and the running costs are about the same fraction. All up, it costs you FAR less to do business online so your room for manoeuvre on pricing is that much greater. People expect to get a good deal online, so you have to give it to them or someone else will. Aside from price competition, quality, rarity and exclusiveness, work well – as always. Think about why people would want to buy from your shop, in the end people buy if they feel the value you offer outweighs the price you charge.

OK, so you’ve got a great idea, now you need some ecommerce software. This is nothing more than a fancy database website that can take credit card payments securely. Simple eh? Well, that’s actually where it all goes downhill for many people, so this is one place where I am not going to advise you to talk to people or see what Google ‘thinks’. I know better, so if you want to make your ecommerce experience a happy one, do as I say, do exactly as I say. Don’t look on the web because it’s a forest of wild claims and jargon (mostly meaningless) and don’t talk to anyone except an experienced ecommerce specialist because no one else has any real basis to advise you.

I estimate that only about 15% of businesses should even consider buying into a custom-built ecommerce ’solution’, and this only because the way they need to sell their goods is complicated. For the other 85%, there are many ready-made mature ecommerce applications which have been on the shelf for ten years or more and that are used by tens of thousands of shops already. Choose one of these – it will slash your startup and running costs and bonsai your time-to-market. The only thing to be careful of is that you really think through how you want to sell your goods, and make sure you choose ecommerce software that can accommodate that.

Now having decided on an ecommerce system you can take a little breather and think about your site’s hosting. Your shop will be open, taking orders 24 hours a day, at least that’s the plan. Hosting (along with your domain name) provides the ‘address’ on the internet where people can find your shop, and ecommerce hosting is just like normal hosting except it must be very reliable and it must be secure. Usually ecommerce hosting costs more than normal web hosting and there are sliding scales of prices to go with the sliding scales of quality, reliability and security that you opt for. I’d advise you to get the best you can afford, and look out for hidden costs that might be triggered if your shop gets really successful.

Security is a priority for both you and your customers. You need to know that your site is safe from hackers and fraud, and your customers need to know that you take seriously your responsibilities to look after their private and financial data. Make sure your shop’s ordering system uses the industry standard SSL encyption technology, most ecommerce systems do. And remember to tell your customers how secure your site is, it breeds confidence.

Which leads us on to the subject of taking payments, which is after all, what this ecommerce exercise is all about. There are several ways to get hold of your customers money: you can store their credit card details online and download them to your computer (if your bank allows you to) or you can pay a company to process them in real-time for you when a customer places an order. Both have pros and cons and this will be the subject of next week’s guide.

It is good to know where your web site visitors come from and what they do after they arrive.
This and other information is available, using special software, from your web site’s access logs.
It can be a good idea to outsource this type of work for reasons of economy
(doing it properly requires investment on several fronts) expertise and impartiality.
If you do then you should expect human analysis as well as tables and charts, and you
should get reports that actually help with the planning, running and assessment of your
web site and marketing campaigns.

Web analysis is how you discover who comes to your web site and what they do there.

It is one of the most important, flexible and useful of all web marketing activities and can help you optimise the design, development and marketing of your website – both in general and in great detail. It is also the quality-control tool par excellence, and provides insights into:

• your web site’s large and small-scale development opportunities and priorities;
• design flaws in certain pages, or across your whole site, that reduce the number of leads or purchases you should get;
• how effective your marketing is;
• your customers’ ‘demographics’, overall performance data and lots of other information that helps you build up a picture of who is using your site, when they are using it, where they are coming from and how they are using it.

A web analyst relies fundamentally on your web site’s access logs. These log files come in various formats; some formats are better than others for web analysis, but all hold raw data that can be broken down into an impressive range of useful information. While data mining programs are used to extract the data from the log files, it is the web analyst who decides what to extract and how to interpret that data. The log analysis software can also generate automatic reports, useful for gathering data according to time and date ranges, ‘hits’, the volume of data, geography, etc.

Despite the obvious advantages web analysis gives to a site manager, it is still one of the most under-utilised marketing activities, particularly among smaller businesses who ironically have the most to gain from it. I believe that’s because:

• they don’t understand how useful it is;
• they don’t have a marketing or development strategy for their web site;
• none of their acquaintances do it, so they don’t either (sheep mentality);
• it’s not an ‘active’ activity (a bit like financial reporting);

If you are the kind of person who likes to run your business in a haphazard sort of way, ruled by guesswork and hunch, then you probably don’t need web analysis and probably will never see the benefit of it. Yet, for the right kind of business, analysis provides the ‘intelligence’ to help you make good decisions and be a good manager. It is the only available source of website performance data, and people who believe they can manage a business-critical website without it are, in my experience, little shy of deluded.

So what is the right kind of business? Well, if any of the following ring any bells then you should be doing web analysis as a matter of course:

• your business relies on your web site, and/or getting people to it;
• you are an ecommerce business;
• your web site is an integral part of your company and has a development budget;

Web analysis has had some bad press though, and many people have the impression that it’s limited to providing large round numbers of general and semi-useful (except for bragging purposes) information. And unfortunately, they are often right, which is the fault of unscrupulous, if not downright dishonest, web companies who peddle such services. But that is to proper web analysis what Bernard Mathews is to healthy eating.

Web analysis can answer subtle questions like:

• how much of my advertising actually leads to sales or enquiries;
• which campaigns are the most successful (and which are failing);
• do my visitors come back – if not, why not;
• what are my visitors interested in;
• are my products well-placed, is my shopping cart designed well, what about my enquiry form;
• does my web site have any structural problems that prevent people reaching places I’d like them to reach;
• which parts of my web site might be most worth expanding?

You can hypothesise use-case scenarios and story-board notional users all you like, but in the end that’s all just a dress-rehearsal. You can live on hunches and guesswork too if you like gambling. But you don’t have to settle for either option because, ultimately, analysis will tell you how good your web site and marketing strategy really are.

Some of these points are covered in other articles, but I thought it would be good to collect them here for your convenience, and so I have a single article to point to when people ask me about Actinic (which is often enough now for me to take the time to write this article).

First off, this article isn’t a how-to or a manual, it is an overview of the main features offered by the Actinic ecommerce system, and some comparisons between it and other systems of the “home-made” variety.

Secondly, some nomenclature: I’ll refer to Actinic as, well, Actinic. However, when doing so I actually mean Actinic Business Client (there are a couple of other lesser versions you can consider if your needs are very simple). And I’ll refer, for historical reasons, to other systems built to order by companies around the country as “Bespoke”. Bespoke is actually something of a misnomer (referring as it does to high-end tailored clothes), your local ecommerce provider might refer to their particular offering as custom, bespoke, in-house, built-to-order, purpose built, or any other form of words that means basically – “we made it specially for you”. For my purposes they are all Bespoke.

Overview of Actinic’s main features

• flexibility:
  Actinic steals the socks off the competition when it comes to general purpose retailing features. It can deal with (almost) any retailing model except those with very specific requirements (see below), you can bundle products or split them into smaller products (components), product management is graphical and comprehensive, there are advanced features for setting up complicated types of products.

  This makes it perfect for selling groceries, musical instruments, records, wine, books, hardware and electrical items. It is not as suitable for selling, for example, curtains which often require complicated relationships between a product’s components: ie. a length of curtain might be sold by the metre, to a particular template, and with optional gathering, types of heading and pelmets (which also have their own styles and options). That sort of retail model might be better suited to a bespoke system.

• marketing and sales features:
  Actinic comes with a lengthy list of marketing and promotion features that includes sophisticated discounting, related products, also bought, top products and new products. Products can be priced according to volume, quantity or any other metric you need to use. Discounts can be applied to customers with a particular sort of account, for instance, you can give your trade customers a VAT-free experience, your regular customers a 10% discount, or any customer a discount based on their order total. The flexibility is really impressive and is able to cope with pretty much all the most common forms of price marketing.
• secure order system:
  Actinic downloads orders straight to your desktop and it interfaces with numerous payment providers (for instance Paypal or Worldpay). In fact Actinic is a desktop application, which has many benefits for you as a shopkeeper. The secure order processing though is a vital facility which again comes with a variety of options according to the type of order processing you want to do. Want to download your orders and swipe the card details yourself? No problem. Want your customers’ details to be processed in real-time by your bank? No problem. The options don’t end there either, however the subject starts to get a bit technical so I’ll move on to…
• reliability and pedigree:
  This is an overlooked but fundamental “feature” that ecommerce system vendors ought to take more seriously than they sometimes do. Your ecommerce shop is, in many cases, your livelihood. You can’t afford for it to be crashing or getting mixed up between whose order is for which customer, or sending orders off to the wrong address. Do not underestimate the number and gravity of the sorts of problems that you can find with an ecommerce application.

  Your system needs to be rock solid, thoroughly tested, and all the main facilities need to work properly 100% of the time. Aside from the potential inconvenience and headaches system bugs can cause, they can thoroughly damage your business’s reputation too. Unlike your friendly neighbourhood bespoke systems, Actinic has eight years of solid, continuous development to call on. It is robust, secure and as near as damn it bug-free (it’s certainly free of category 1 bugs). It is also designed, built and supported by a large company with experience in EPOS and traditional secure retailing. And there are regular updates and patches to keep your site secure from hackers.

• time to market:
  Most people, once they’ve taken the decision to start doing business online, want to just get on with it. They do not want to wait for several months for a bespoke system to go through the design, implementation and testing phases (which they absolutely require). And why should you have to wait around for someone to re-invent the wheel, particularly when they have little chance of improving on it? In the 3-4 months you wait for your bespoke system to roll out, your competitors could have stolen a march on you. Using Actinic, you can get a basic ecommerce business up and running in days. For more complicated sites it might take a few weeks from start to finish.
• maintenance and development
  No system lasts forever. Needs, priorities and tastes change over time and your shop needs to change accordingly. If your competitors start offering new features you need to keep up. You will, anyway, want to change things about your shop as time goes by: as you gain experience as an online retailer, as you think up new ways to do things, or as you notice ways your current site could be improved. The engine that runs your ecommerce business needs to be able to cope with this natural evolution as much as possible. Actinic is updated regularly with relevant new features and the features in the current versions are more than enough for most businesses. Even if you want to upgrade your whole application this is not going to break the bank. On the contrary, bespoke engines are very expensive to develop and upgrade. This is mainly because it’s time consuming to do that (as the system needs to be redesigned, rebuilt and retested), and unfortunately, as the sole customer, you usually have to bear the brunt of those development costs.
• other Actinic features:
  • Stock monitoring.
    Actinic can monitor your stock levels and withdraw products from sale if they’ve run out. It can also continue to display them but with an out-of-stock message.
  • Office integration.
    Actinic can import and export data to Sage Line 50 and Quickbooks.
  • Growth potential.
    It is capable of dealing with high volume sites and product catalogues containing up to 20,000 products. You can be sure, if your hosting is up to the task, that Actinic won’t crumple under the weight of your success.
  • Go worldwide.
    Actinic also has excellent delivery and tax options, which can be configured independently for different regions and zones (UK, Europe, US, Rest of the World, for example). You can choose how delivery is calculated using a variety of measures that obviously includes weight or quantity, but which can also determine how much to charge for larger orders or where the customer opts for a slower or faster delivery service.

The million dollar question

In most cases cost is a deciding factor. Actinic is in my (humbly expert) opinion, the best value ecommerce system on the market – by a mile. Even a shop built using the top of the range Actinic Business client can start from as little as a thousand pounds, with prices increasing according to how much design customisation you want. This is a fraction (literally) of what a bespoke system would cost you for comparable features and power, and it would arrive soon after order bug-free and ready to rock – quite unlike your bespoke option which teeters out to first testing after a long gestation like a new born deer with wobbly legs.

Free and easy

There is a class of ecommerce system that I haven’t mentioned. Because I don’t think you should consider them. I’m talking about the ‘free’ systems that most hosting companies bundle next to ‘Javascript Hit Counter’ and the other free software that comes with your hosting control panel. Now these systems take longer to customise than Actinic, offer a pittance of features, and generally can’t be customised beyond the product catalogue (so your customers check out in something rather less than style). On top of all this, by the time you’ve paid a developer to customise it for you, I guarantee it will have cost you more or as much as an equivalently styled Actinic Catalogue site. These free systems aren’t free, and are the equivalent of shabby market retailing. If you really can’t afford to set up shop properly I advise you to forget it and trade on Ebay or Amazon instead.

Truly Bespoke

Ok, Actinic is not the last word in ecommerce. I started this article saying that it has limitations, and it does. I don’t recommend it, or any pre-built system, for big ecommerce enterprises. Big retailers who have a lot to gain and lose need a relationship with their ecommerce provider that must by need go beyond that which Actinic is capable of providing. Sometimes they need to be able to request innovative and forward-looking features that pave the way for off-the-shelf packages to follow. They might need several development scenarios to choose from, comprehensive documentation or security systems in place, any of which will require a bespoke solution.

However, here I’m talking about Bespoke with a capital ‘B’, where the word fits it’s original meaning of a high-quality product designed specifically for a wealthy client. This option is, without argument, the ultimate ecommerce option, but it’s available only to a very few – because it costs a fortune to create and develop. There are many reasons to go bespoke – but these days they apply to a small percentage of ecommerce retailers – those who can afford the time and who have the resources, and (usually to their chagrin) those whose business models don’t allow them to use off-the-shelf solutions. Going for a bespoke solution without a real need or more importantly the time and money to do it properly is a brave decision.

Conclusion

You know what I’m going to say. It’s a no brainer! at least for almost all small or medium-sized businesses. You will pay ten or fifteen times the price for a bespoke system that is as powerful, making them easily the best ecommerce websites available. Which, obviously, they would have to be for Kilroy James to recommend them.

Waiver:

Neither John Kilroy or anyone at Kilroy James has been bribed by Actinic in the making of this article

Specialising in French and Italian red wine, and champagne, marc1wines has a growing reputation for quality wine from rare and small (sometimes boutique) producers. This is an excellent site for anyone who buys wine online, and features some lovely photos of wine.

The owner Marc Medland runs a successful wine merchants in Aldeburgh. The marc1wines.co.uk website is a new venture for him and he has been keen to do it well from the start, getting in designer Chris Keeble (of Keeble and Hall) to produce some photography and a conceptual design. Marc chose to base the website on the Actinic ecommerce system, which is a good choice as it boasts class-leading features, security and power. We’re very pleased with this site and think it’s a great base for marc1wines to grow from.

Even the most extreme search engine optimisation won’t, on its own, jet-propel your web site up to position 1, or even to page one, on Google necessarily. Good positions are best achieved by running a well-rounded web marketing strategy, SEO is just one of the many tactics such a plan would employ.

Although this article deals with the Google search engine, a real web marketing strategy will always aim for good spread across a considered (researched) list of other search engines. Afterall, Google may have a very dominant position serving 63% of all British web search enquiries³ (compared to 47% in the US), but that’s no reason to ignore the rest.