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.