Alright, so you have decided to take your idea of an Online Shop to the market, Good! Here's what you should have already done.
Think
through every step and work on the finer aspects of your plan, build a
business strategy, do a SWOT analysis (don't ask me what that is, you
should know already, if you don't then just google ;-) , identify
competition and analyze their business, their operations and their
numbers. Then ask yourself if you should STILL do it. (
More Here - My first article on eCommerce and starting an online shop)
Assuming
you have chalked out a good business plan and are all set to get things
going, your first task is to identify and sign-up with the key
stakeholders, whether they are partners, vendors, staff, service
providers,... whoever you need to bring your shop to life. You don't
have to get them all on-board, but you need to identify them, talk to
them and prepare them for when they need to get in.
One of the key
stakeholders at this point are the people who will put your online shop
together. They could be your partners or vendors, but make sure you
have the right people. Here's what you need to look for
What you need to look for in a IT Software Team
- Your IT team should be able to understand your business plan, the numbers, the backend / offline process, everything.
- They
should not be passive listeners, but should actively contribute to
finding solutions, they should be aware of trends, and follow best
practices.
- They should know when to suggest and when not to
interfere. Wrong inputs can waste a lot of time and impact your thought
process.
- Make sure you will get support when you need it, to
keep things going you would need them to be available. More so after the
shop goes live.
- The ideal team would comprise of
- Business Analyst
- Understand your business and translate them into functional and
non-functional requirements. If the Business Analyst doesn't get it
right then the rest of your team will be heading in the wrong direction.
The BA should also be able to suggest the best practices.
- Architect
- A good architect to design the application, whether you go with Open
Source eCommerce Platforms, Licensed Applications, Applications built on
Proprietary Software or Develop your platform from scratch, your
architect will be the key.
- Project Manager -
You will only see your shop go online if the Project Manager is able to
get the developers to implement the architecture and design accurately
and on-time. The project manager needs to understand the Requirements,
the Architecture and Technology.
- Development Team - Your development team should have a good UI Designer, UI Developers and a bunch of good Programmers
- Testing Team
- The testing team has to be involved from day 1 of your project
life-cycle. These are the people who will ensure your shop functions as
per the defined requirements in all the possible situations and
environments targeted.
So, now that you have a good team who can build your shop, here are some key aspects to keep in mind while designing your shop
User Experience
- This
is like your shop window. It can be a make-or-break in more ways than
one. You need to get things absolutely right, Visual Appeal, Organized
Layout without clutter, Quick Links to important information, and most
importantly Showcase Products that customers are most interested in
buying.
- Make your customer recognize your site by just looking
at it and not reading the logo. With most of the eCommerce shops being
just a list of products thrown onto the homepage, I feel this should be a
primary focus / instruction for the UI Designer.
- Your customer needs to get to the product of interest as quickly as possible, i.e. with a maximum of 2~3 clicks.
Architecture
- A
good architecture should not only fulfill your current needs but also
consider the future enhancements and the scope to scale as your customer
base grows.
- A flexible architecture that would help you
integrate your shop with the numerous online services from social media
integration to payment gateways and more would take the shop a long way.
- Always
consider options to let others integrate to your platform quickly and
easily, whether it is your vendors or partners or affiliates, at some
point or the other you would want some integration to get them onto your
platform. APIs are key here.
Development Environment
- Choose
a development environment that is popular in the market. Going for
something exotic could become a pain to maintain, specially with the
availability of the right resources are a problem these days.
- The
environment you choose has to be cost effective, secure and reliable.
The first you should already know is required for you to competitive in
the current market, the security aspect has to be analysed and taken
care of, most environments are not secure by default and steps have to
be put in to make them secure. Reliability is a key issue as some
environments are more stable than others.
- Personally I'm
comfortable with the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack, its open
source, can scale, has to be made secure (that can be achieved) and is
reliable.
Hosting Environment
- Hosting
environments are a dim-a-dozen. Identify the right one. Apart from the
usual costing, configuration and bandwidth package. Its important that
you look at the support options. When things go wrong, you need quick
response to get things sorted out.
- Look for servers that cater
to the region that your shop is most likely to service. It now does make
sense to have a server located closer to the geographic location of
your biggest market. If your traffic is spread across the world, then
look for a service provider who can give you the options to choose
mirrors across the world. One such service provider would be aws - amazon web service
- With
could service offered by a number of players, it makes sense to start
with a package just enough for you and scale the environment as you go.
Payment Gateways
- Payment
gateways operate in many different ways. Consider the options that the
gateway provides for integration - you could process the transaction
details on your site and then trigger the payment through the gateway
(requires https and you need to make sure that your site is secure and
complies with all security tests) or let the payment gateway handle the
complete transaction without you having to collect card or account
information on your site.
- Choose the payment gateway and the
package based on your transaction volume, both in terms of number of
transactions and the average amount per transaction.
- Look at
what are the payment options your customer gets, i.e. payment through
Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Net Banking (which banks are tied up),
Wallets.
Analytics
- There is only one way to
find out if your online shop is doing well, and that's with analytics.
With proper analytics in place, you will have a continuous feedback
mechanism that tells you everything from who are your customers, where
are they coming from and where are they heading, when are they visiting
and when are they leaving, what is turning them on and what is turning
them off.
- With analytics tracking in place, you also need
somebody to make sense of the data that it generates. Make sure you have
a good analytics expert or partner who can look at things from a
business perspective.
- Don't even think of going live without analytics!
Support
- The
basics for good customer relations, you need to help your customer to
navigate, choose products, buy, pay and help them track their products
till delivery. Once delivered, you need to ensure that the customer is
satisfied and if they are not, how do they return or get a refund? You
need to engage with them to get them on your side.
- From the day
you launch your shop, make sure that there is somebody at the end of a
line waiting to take customer calls. You will need to help any customer
who has any trouble using your platform. Without support in-place the
customers feel let-down instantly.
- Although a call-in support is
definitely a must have, support need not be only call based, you could
also engage the customers through online chat, email, forms or sms.
Each
of these taken care, you must be able to build a good platform to then
take it to the next logical step of actually rolling out your shop to
the market.
In my further posts, I will talk about the other aspects that need to fall-in-place.
Until then, get that shop in order and get it online!
