Is An E-Commerce Site Right For My Business?

To decide whether an E-commerce website is for you, it's best to make sure that the product or service you manufacture/resell is suitable for selling on-line.

The cheapest and quickest way is to add PayPal buttons (or similar) to your new or existing site. These buttons can be added to represent products on your website such as t-shirts, C.D.'s etc..The buttons themselves can contain the cost of the item along with shipping cost as well. This button is then linked to your account and you only pay for the service when a transaction is made (by PayPal taking a small percentage depending on the amount). This means that the payment buttons can be left alone without any extra cost to yourself until a payment is taken.

This set up is perfect for some small companies, but there are few pitfalls to be aware of:

The first problem is the lack of stock control. Say hypothetically you are in a company with promotional t-shirts for sale and you have 5 of each size. There is nothing stopping someone visiting your website and purchasing 6 t-shirts of a set size in the night. You may think this is a good thing but if you have a minimum order for promotional materials, you might have to order another 10 just to satisfy the order for the extra 1 t-shirt. If you then cannot sell the other 9 then you have outstanding stock. There is nothing in the software to check against a current stock level, so if a unit or product goes out of stock, the button will continue to function and take payments.

Following from this is if you have multiple items in your catalogue. If a price needs amending or stock needs removing, the code has to be edited by hand to amend the prices associated with the buttons. If you have 50 products, this can create a lot of work that can cause the website to be off-line for a time. This is also true in the case of promotional runs, each individual item would need to be amended to reflect the changed cost.

Also if you are looking to sell digital products (music or electronic books) there is no current system offered with the PayPal buttons to send digital downloads to a customer. So if a customer visits your site in the middle of the night, he/she has to wait until you can physically send a link to that person the morning after (Or in the case of a weekend, the following Monday). If a customer is used to paying for something on-line and receiving it straight away, this could affect the sale.

A Full E-Commerce System

There are many different systems that can be used to create an E-commerce shop. The majority of these are built on what is called a "Content Management System". Simply put, rather than the pages of a website being static like a newspaper the pages are generated based on information stored in a database, then a template is applied to the pages to make them look more appealing to a viewer.

When a shop is built using a CMS system, a stock inventory can be used. This means that if a product has a finite amount of stock, the system can be configured to let the customer know or to simply display on screen that the product is unavailable.

As well as offering a stock control system, most well built E-Commerce systems offer multiple features such as shipping address calculation, the ability for shoppers to manage their own accounts, order histories, order confirmation emails, multiple currency and language support amongst others.

There is a difference though with work and time involved between adding PayPal buttons to a website and creating a fully functional E-Commerce site. The other outlay to consider would be a payment handler. It's possible to use PayPal as a payment handler (only being charged when a payment is taken). If you would prefer to take credit card payments directly on the site, this is also possible but different charges would apply.