Re: FN-FORUM: Ecommerce Round up

date posted 5th March 2008 12:53

We built a store from scratch last year which did really well, although it's
shut now as we're changing what we are going to sell on it.

Used ColdFusion (as that is what I know) with MySQL DB and Protx
integration. We were also in the process of adding payoffline as a payment
option - this allows people to order online but get a barcoded invoice and
pay at a PayPoint physical store. We also had telephone payment options.

One thing that knarks me is the bank's insistence that we have 2 merchant
numbers, one for online sales and the other for phone orders. While this is
fine for bigger sellers the combined minimum fee meant we didn't get the
volume of orders we needed to justify the costs. Also 2 lots of statements
to trawl through each month.

We didn't add PayPal, although I think we will for the future.

SEO was a big issue and when we first launched the site it was all query
string driven. When we changed that using a URL rewrite module hits went up
10x. We also changed the Title tag to automatically include the part number
of the product, again this increased hits. When we added the part
description to the title (e.g. Kingston DataTraveler 4GB USB Drive) this
also improved hit quality (not hits) as we got people landing on the right
page for the product they were searching for.

Errr....

As for dabbling, don't. It takes a lot of hard work to keep an ecommerce
site going. One of the other reasons we closed for a bit is on some days we
were spending an entire afternoon packing and shipping stuff - a nice
problem to have of course - but if you are dabbling as we were, then this
eats into your time on other projects. So if you don't already have the
infrastructure for picking and packing consider this carefully.

Another aspect we had problems with was stock control. We held a small
amount of fast moving items but relied on distributor data feeds for most of
the stock we listed. Their daily datafeeds needed careful monitoring as
prices changed, sometimes wildly, from day to day which was an expensive
lesson we learnt in the early days. So we had to write a price check routine
to ensure daily pricing was more than what we were buying for.

Having said all that, I found running the site and building it really really
rewarding. It was fun trying to add in new features like People who bought..
And Other people who looked at/searched for.. And these features really do
work too. We also found adding in filters (e.g. Reduce selection by brand,
price, etc.) worked wonders on two levels. People clicked on these filters a
lot and it also produces more focussed pages for search engines to chew on.
After introducing these our page count on Google went from ~6000 pages to
30,000+ all of these with headers like Memorex CD-R or Kingston USB Flash
Drives.

Could go on for ages but will respond to other's posts as they remind me of
stuff I have forgotten.




On 5/3/08 13:49, "Tony Crockford" [EMAIL REMOVED] wrote:

>
> On a personal note Xebit ltd are planning to dabble in some online
> selling, (car parts and Racing Simulators set-ups) so I thought I'd
> ask for some suggestions and draw on your collective experience for
> the best way to get started...
>
> So, what shop builder, payment gateway etc are we all using/planning
> on using for our next project and why? (I was looking at Tradingeye,
> but it seems to be getting more expensive)
>
> What are the merits/demerits of the various payment gateways, when do
> you choose protx over paypal pro etc. do you need a merchant account
> with a bank? which one is best/cheapest etc...
>
> I promise to collect all responses together and write up a guide to
> getting started in ecommerce for the wiki...
>
> Thank you for your thoughts....
>
> ;o)