DesignerMark Blog

e-commerce: your options

There are many ways of enabling direct online sales of products and services via your website and the internet, ranging from simple “BUY” buttons if you only have a few or even a single product to offer, all the way up to full e-commerce systems which behave more like Amazon, with all the enhanced features that entails such as Best Sellers, Customer Reviews, Multibuy options, Multi Currency and full back-end order and customer management tools.

So, what considerations will you need to make?

The first step is to understand what products you will have available and estimate the number of sales you expect to realistically make per month in the first year or so of the site going live. These 2 points will dictate, to a certain degree, the type of site you will need and the most suitable payment gateway for taking payments.

You should decide how you want visitors to interact with your site. Do you want them to be able to search using keywords, or would simply navigating through a series of categories and menus work for your products?

Do visitors need to be able to get a lot of extra information on each product or service to help them make an informed buying decision (techinal data, extra photos, customer comments, video examples/walkthroughs etc) or would a single description and a few (or even just one) photo work?

Do you want to be able to offer advanced features such as product suggestions, discounts for buying multiples or groups of products, trade login with alternate pricing, special offers if a discount code is entered (which can be promoted via eMarketing or offline advertising etc). These decisions impact the type of site you will need more directly – often falling outside of what a simpler system is capable of.

Website options

Taking into account the decisions made from the pointers above, you can plan out the site structure and systems. Here are some options but there are list of ways of achieving anything to do with e-commerce so feel free to contact DesignerMark for advice.

Mals e-commerce shopping cart
Simple ‘buy’ buttons linking to a third-party shopping cart, which is configured through a control panel to set up the carriage costs, shipping zones, payment gateway, email receipts etc.
Mals is a great option for a basic e-commerce presence. It has a lot of flexibility on the back end but is not as easy to work into an editable site, so its ideal if your website is being managed by the developer (me!) but not so great (but not impossible) if you want to add and edit products yourself via a CMS.
To link to a Payment gateway there is a £5 per month charge (which is kind of essential) so it’s very good value.
Read more about Mals here: http://www.mals-e.com

eBay
An even quicker way in, but with a lot of draw backs, is eBay. You can quickly set up a store with full keyword search capabilities, but are pretty much limited ti it displaying within the eBay templates.

Google Checkout
As with most Google services, this is a free cart system which can work with various off-the-shelf packages or by integrating ‘buy’ buttons on your site in a similar way to PayPal.

Read more about Google Checkout here: http://checkout.google.com/seller/integrate.html

Off the shelf solutions
There are lots of pre-made packages available to enable e-commerce but I have always found them disappointing from a design point of view. They all tend to be very template driven and hard to customise, so you end up just accepting the layout they give you, so I would not really recommend these for the types of bespoke sites we like to create at DesignerMark.

J-Shop
This is the top end solution for e-commerce that we can recommend. It offers all the bells and whistles in a fully integrated package. You can get a full Content Management System for adding categories and products etc, customer login to recognise regular customers, special offers system, dynamic best sellers, full order management, full customer relations manager including an e-marketing system with customisable template for all emails, stats on site usage and advanced options such as “customers who bought this also bought”, product grouping, alternate pricing, multi-currency and multi-language. It can also be customised to enhance the functionality to do whatever you need it to.

Obviously the setup and development costs will reflect this enhanced power and control you can achieve, but to get these results ere really isn’t a lot in between this and the less flexible options.

See an example of a J-Shop site here: http://gardenmania.designermark.biz

It will ask for a username and password to access the demo site. Use “designermark” for both to gain access.

Payment gateways

Whichever way you go, a Payment Gateway will be required. If you have your own PDQ machine already, unfortunately it is no longer really a viable alternative to use that for online sales because you are not allowed to hold users credit card numbers unless you have a dedicated server and an SSL Certificate for your website domain, which both have their own costs and problems associated with them.

Here are some suggestions and Payment Gateway options to consider:-

PayPal: Relatively simple to set up, tried and tested system with good support and some effective back-end tools. PayPal still has the assumption attached to it that customers would have to have a PayPal account to pay but this is not true. The option to pay with credit card without having an actual PayPal account is there but it takes a low key visibility because PayPal wants people to sign up for their own benefit! However this is a good option to get quickly up and running with online payments.

PayPal also offer a ‘Pro’ option which allows you to embed the payment forms on your own website, so that you can keep the look and feel consistent within your own design.

PayPal charge 1.4% to 3.4% plus 20 pence per transaction.

Read more about these options here: https://www.paypal-business.co.uk/accept-credit-cards-on-a-website-with-paypal/index.htm

SagePay (formerly Protx): This is a more professional and more customisable option. It allows for a transparent process by embedding the payment forms within your own site, thus users never leave your domain name through the whole sales process which will give a tighter feel to the whole website.

They have a secure terminal which you can use to take credit card details over the telephone or on-site with customers.

SagePay charge a flat rate of £20 per month for up to 1000 transactions per quarter (e.g. Average of 333 transactions per month) then a single fat rate of 10 pence per transaction after that.

Read more about SagePay here: http://www.sagepay.com/products_services/sage_pay_go

Your business’ bank may have their own alternatives but it would not preclude you from using any of the above services if you preferred them.

Summary

It is one of the areas of the internet where there are just so many options and “ways of skinning the cat” that it’s hard to cover it all. If you want a chat or have any questions, feel free to contact DesignerMark or reply to this post.