After countless number of projects in developing e-commerce web sites for clients, it has finally hit me that most of the small companies and entrepreneurs simply don’t have the 1) time, 2) knowledge, 3) money, 4) manpower to run and operate an e-commerce web site. A lot of the time, customers simply want to build a site, hoping that once the site is launched, orders would roll in without them having to do anything..well that may be true 10 years ago, but in today’s online landscape, having an online storefront is not much different from operating a physical brick-n-mortar store…lots of effort is required.

In order to have a good site, the store owner would need to have the following (this may serve as a good starting point for a checklist, but it is far from complete)

1. product information (SKU #, Product Name, Product Description, Price, Inventory, Categorization)
2. product images (the quality of the product photography essentially makes or breaks your site, if you don’t have good product photography, you may as well stop thinking about launching the site)
3. domain name - your store should have a easy to remember web address, start searching for a domain name if you haven’t already. Yahoo domain is pretty good for finding domains, but Godaddy is cheaper to perform the registation.
4. corporate identity - having a good logo to go along with a domain name is important in building a brand for your business; you need to make your brand memorable, and having a good logo is a good start. To say the least, it makes small stores look more professional and bigger than they actually are.
5. web site - you will need a web developer and graphic designer to help you build out the store from idea to reality, you will need to know what you want in the site, and how the store would look like.  store looking around on sites like amazon.com, gap.com, walmart.com (some of the most popular e-commerce sites) to get a better understanding of how you want to site to look like and what features you would like to have in your site.

Once you have accomplished all the above, it is time to start thinking about promoting the site, we will talk more about web promotion in a future post.

In conclusion, there’s a lot of work required in building an e-commerce web site.  We, at Casual Commerce, understand that, and would like to offer a service in which we will take care of all the technical and tedious work that future store owners have no time to deal with.  For a monthly fee, we will offer the following:

1. Help you register you domain name (you pay the registration fee)
2. Help you design a corporate identity (logo, business cards, stationary headers, etc.)
3. Build your store, incorporating the corporate identity.
4. Product information maintenance
5. Product photography
6. Web site promotion
7. Email set up
8. Technical support related to your web site

The store owner’s job…focus on bringing in sales.  Happy E-commerce.

blog posting, e-commerce, services checklist, e-commerce, services