Re: Question: steps/apps required for ecommerce?

It all depends on the scale of your client's operations. I have several 
clients running small businesses on just a normal isp account.

For example, I have a yoga teacher (http://www.zipworld.com.au/~sophia) who 
sells her books, cassette tapes, videos and seminars on her personal isp 
account.  I set up some simple forms that accept credit card numbers, but 
they do nothing but just email the details to her, and she does the rest in 
exactly the same way as if she'd taken the orders over the phone.

On the other hand, I have a store of my own at 
http://www.afp.zip.com.au/models.html  where I sell $1500 model warship kits 
and that's all based on a flat file catalogue, perl scripts to manipulate 
the search and display of the items, and perl handling the order entry and 
secure handling of the transmission of the order to me.

And going a little further up the scale, I'm currently building a site for a 
large client on a much higher traffic site, where we have all the tricks - 
our own server, secure connections, payment gateways for instant and 
automatic credit card processing.

What's required depends on what your client needs and can afford.  This is 
no different to the situation if you were a shopfitter, building retail 
stores in shopping malls for companies.   "How much is a store?"   "Depends 
on what kind of store you want."

But don't be fooled into thinking that in order to do business on the web 
you have to have a whole lot of technology and expense.  Possibly you do.  
But possibly you don't either.


For you to offer e-commerce sites, I'd suggest you would need to be able to 
advise on the following as a minimum:

(1) Know about communication - not the technology, the words and pictures.  
What sells things and what doesn't.

(2) Know how to build good web pages that don't break when someone comes by 
with IE2 or Opera, or that don't look rotten when viewed with Netscape if 
you personally use IE (or vice versa)

(3) Know what the rules are for getting creditcard merchant services, and 
how you operate the account.  (e.g. what you have to get from the cardholder 
to have a valid transaction, how you prove your claim in the event a buyer 
wants to reverse the transaction).  Know all the steps required to provide 
an audit trail for the card company to prove the buy did actually order the 
goods,  did use a valid card, did receive the goods in good order and 
condition.

(4) Know the basics of building and making forms work.  (e.g. don't require 
states and zipcodes in your forms unless you want to restrict buyers to USA 
buyers)  Know how to acknowledge the order to the buyer by email at the same 
time as advising your client's customer service department that there's an 
order to fill

(5)  Know how to be a good account manager for your client.  They'll come to 
rely on you (hopefully) as an adviser for their on-line business, in the 
same way they rely on their advertising agency for their other business and 
their lawyers for legal things etc.


I hope this helps you.  There is a lot more you can know, but I think this 
is a minimum.  You should also subscribe to the HWG-business list, which is 
really the place for this kind of topic.  There's heaps of great advice 
going on there all the time about the non-technical aspects of running web 
sites.

Cheers,
Mike Kear,
AFP Web Development
Windsor, NSW, Australia
http://www.afp.zip.com.au





>From: Shelley Reid Lute <Shell(at)WebEss.com>
>To: hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
>Subject: Question: steps/apps required for ecommerce?
>Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:07:33 -0500
>
>goodmorning all-
>
>I am not clear on all the aspects needed to start an ecommerce site.
>
>I'm on a mac and using macromedia products.
>
>The client needs a merchant account?
>
>I need software to design a storefront? (I'm not a programmer.)
>
>I need a specific store hosting company that my store software is
>compatible with?
>
>Hosting company that provides a secure server?
>
>What else do I need to know?
>
>URLs to read about this that you can suggest? Or a quick reader's
>digest answer of info for me to check into.
>
>thank you very much,
>Shelley
>
>English Shepherd photo album-
>http://www.WebEss.com/ES/
>
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>WebEssentials
>       web site design
>Shelley Reid Lute
>webess(at)WebEss.com
>http://www.WebEss.com
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>

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