How e-commerce works


Planning Your E-Commerce Imlementation

When you hire a service provider to designof  products.
your e-commerce website, you need to be
involved in the implementation strategy in4. Vendor support and commitments: Review the
order to ensure that the final product willvendor's service obligations to ensure what
be what you want and that your forthcomingis included in the implementation. Contact
costs and complexities are notother businesses for feedback about the
inappropriately  higher  than they should be.vendor. See samples of final shopping carts
having been implemented by the the same
If you wait until the system has beensoftware  you  are  considering  purchasing.
completely implemented, it can be too late.
The cost to reconfigure a system is5. Documentation: Make sure you receive the
prohibitive. As you add more products to yourlist of passwords, directory names, features,
product line, it gets harder to change theadd-on products used for the implementation
design and internal setup. You are riskingso that if you need to change service
missed sales opportunities if it takes tooproviders, you will have all the required
long to update your product line or if yourinformation. You will save yourself big
shopping cart is too complex for thelosses if you do this. Documentation should
end-user. The design has to consider not onlyalso be provided. To ensure this gets done
ease of use, but also the 'back-end' setupmost effectively, you should receive
since the ease of use is dependent on thedocumentation updates throughout the project
internal  setup.planning and implementation. Don't wait until
the end to ask for this. Part of the
You can reduce your costs and frustration ifdocumentation should include what you need to
you raise certain issues with your designerdo on an ongoing basis. For example, how to
before  they  start  designing.  For example,upload, download, export, import, re-index,
etc.
1. Simplification: How many levels of
products do you really need? How complex is6. Naming conventions: What a difference the
the pricing structure? The more levels and/orname makes! If your products were kitchen
options (attributes), the more clicks a userproducts such as: home kitchen utensils 1 =
would have to do and the more confusion itone of your utensils home kitchen appliances
may cause. You could lose your prospective1 = one of your appliances. then naming your
buyer this way. Your maintenance costs areproducts 1HKU and 1HKA, respectively, would
proportional to the complexities, i.e., thenot be the best way to name them. You
more  complex,  the  higher  the  costs.wouldn't easily be able to list all home
kitchen products. A better way might be HKU1
2. Design approach: Review the maintenanceand HKA1; then searching for all home kitchen
plans and strategy to ensure the bestproducts with the code 'HK' would give you
approach is taken for your business strategy.all utensils and appliances. Adding new
products to your product list would take less
3. Test run a few different products intime. Remember that a computer search works
different categories (adding, changing,from  left  to  right.
attributes) to understand the maintenance
impact of your implementation. It would beBy reviewing these sample issues, you can
more cost-effective to overhaul at theensure a better, more cost-effective
beginning of implementation rather than laterimplementation.
down the road. Don't just test one category



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