Are You Ready for E-Commerce?

Basic Strategy Tips for Businesses Who Want a Piece of the Action

Rick Eng
Mirror Contributing Writer

Have you been thinking about taking your business online? Is there an audience in the vast domain of cyberspace for your product, service or message? Certainly there are many success stories making headlines today. 

Ebay (www.ebay.com), the highly successful online auction house, has shown that anything, from Beanie Babies to Civil War memorabilia can be traded or sold over the Internet. Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), the behemoth online bookseller, handles almost $6 million in transactions daily. Five million dollars worth of PCs are purchased through Dell Computer’s web site (www.dell.com) every day. Online catalog shopping is expected to reach almost $12 billion this year. E-commerce is definitely big business.

Even if your e-commerce ambitions are not as lofty as the big blue-chip players, you can follow the same route in developing a strategy that could ensure that selling online will be a boom rather than a bust.

If you’re not ready to include an e-commerce component in your business, a web site can enhance customer service and provide promotional opportunities. At the very least, it gives you a 24-hour business presence. There are no days off for the web. Online, you are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  And, the same level of business and service is available regardless of location or time zone.  In addition, a web site can deliver updated information more efficiently and less expensively. There is no lead time involved with outside printers, mailing houses or business directories.

Changes in product pricing and availability can render a printed catalog obsolete before the end of its circulation, but the web is a dynamic medium and can be updated in real time.  But poor planning can spell doom for a company’s online effort: the lack of a clearly thought-out strategy for a seamless transition from a business’s traditional sales process to the online sphere does result in unexpected and potentially expensive fixes. Avoid, too, a knee-jerk reaction to competition that has established online presence. “E-commerce is about providing the greatest convenience for your customers from to the point of transaction,” says Kurt Wolfgang, sales and marketing director for Velocity Networks (www.vel.net), a Los Angeles-based Internet Service Provider specializing in e-commerce web sites. “A great site is not only about fancy graphics; it’s about simplified navigation and content organization. If customers cannot find what they want on your web site, what’s the reason for them to come back?”

According Wolfgang, businesses looking at e-commerce should clearly outline their business objectives: do they want to extend market reach, reduce costs, or improve customer relationships? “It helps us in the process of developing a scalable e-commerce strategy for clients that satisfies current demands and future requirement,” he says. 

Before you engage a web designer on whether your logo should spin, dissolve, or zoom in, here are some questions you should address: 

• Are your products suited for e-commerce? Providers of perishable goods should carefully weight the value of pushing products through e-commerce as opposed to consumer products such as books, clothing, or music CDs.
•   How will your e-commerce system be integrated with your existing system? 
• Will your current operation be able to handle a jump in activity? Identify the points in your supply chain that may be affected. Is your current customer service operation suited for the web? 
• Will you require an increase in personnel to handle online order processing and follow through? Will existing personnel require training for e-commerce? 
• Is your current warehousing and delivery system geared for e-commerce? 
• Can your current advertising and promotional program fit the web medium? 
• Is your current computer system suited for e-commerce? 
• Are your current software applications and hardware scalable and flexible to handle current and future e-commerce activity?
• How will payments be processed? How will returns and refunds be handled? What will you do with a customer’s personal information?
• If you’re planning to collect customer data via the web, how will you process and store the information? How will you use this data to encourage repeat business?

Remember that web commerce encompasses more than just having an attractive virtual storefront on the Internet. It may entice visitors to come to your site once. But more importantly, what will encourage repeat visits? By mapping out a detailed e-commerce strategy before any graphics are scanned and digitized or words are converted to hypertext, you can minimize the uncertainty and the unexpected in the journey to online profits.

Rick Eng is a web design consultant based in Santa Monica. You can write to him through e-mail at rick@vel.net.

To find out more about e-commerce on the web, visit the following web sites: