Retail Blog

Every store needs a place to sell its wares. Whether it is a shop on Main Street, a table at a flea market, or an e-commerce storefront online, you need a place to display what you have to sell and accept payments from customers. Many people, including experienced off-line merchants, find the process of selecting an e-commerce storefront daunting. This article is intended to decode the technojargon that so often pervades discussion of anything online, and focus on the most important details.

In its most basic form an e-commerce storefront is just a product catalog, a shopping cart, and an integration to a payment processing gateway. The product catalog can be as simple as a single HTML page that many web hosting providers will provide for free. However, if you want to grow your business you will need the ability to adapt your storefront to changing market environments by adding and removing products, and even changing the look and feel of your storefront. Unless you want to learn HTML and another programming language, you will need an e-commerce storefront system.

What Features do you Need?
An e-commerce storefront system provides all of the features required to sell products online. A good e-commerce storefront system should provide the following features.

1. Store Design

Experienced visual merchandisers know that small changes to the layout of a store can have a big impact on sales. Many merchants are frustrated when they start selling online because they can’t change the layout and look and feel of their online storefront. A good e-commerce storefront will provide merchants with the ability to change the layout and color scheme of their e-commerce storefront without any computer programming.

2. Product Catalog

A product catalog stores information about your products in a structured format. There are several benefits to a good product catalog, including the ability to easily sell the same product on multiple pages of your storefront, and maintain a single place to edit the product information. Product catalogs also make it much easier to have products loaded into your storefront, but not yet available for sale. This functionality is vital when you are reselling a product from a manufacturer that may have an embargo date on the product.

3. Shopping Cart and Checkout

Every storefront needs a basic shopping cart that allows your customers to select products they want to buy, continue shopping, and then provide payment information. However many storefronts provide feature-rich shopping carts that may include the ability to save a shopping cart for later or suggest additional items for the customer based on the contents of their cart.

4. Payment Processing

An entire article could easily be dedicated to payment processing alone. Suffice it to say that any decent e-commerce storefront must have the ability to process your customer’s credit card transactions. Some storefronts will only work with major gateway providers, such as Authorize.net, while others will support other providers. If you have an existing relationship with a gateway provider make sure that the e-commerce storefront supports your provider.

5. Product Promotion

Good product promotion features allow you to feature certain products outside of the more rigid categorization imposed by a product catalog. For example, a storefront may allow you to create a category “Home Page” and feature some number of products on that page. These products could have sale prices whose prices will increase after a fixed period of time.

6. Order Management

What happens after your customer buys something? Larger Internet retailers usually have a separate system to manage the life-cycle of an order, and many e-commerce storefronts will have basic order management functionality built in. The most basic functionality you need is the ability to print a copy of the customer’s orders for your records. Many storefronts also support the printing of a packing slip that can be included in the customer’s order as a receipt of purchase.

7. Shipping & Taxes

Do you collect taxes from customers that live in the same state that your company maintains a business presence? Many retailers do, and some e-commerce storefronts provide the ability to calculate the correct sales tax for the customer. In addition to taxes, shipping can represent a substantial percentage of the customer’s cost and the customer will want to know exactly how much shipping and handling will cost. Many e-commerce storefronts will provide the ability to specify shipping and handling costs on a per item basis. Other storefronts many only allow shipping and handling as a percentage of the customer’s total sale. It’s important that you understand if your e-commerce storefront will support how you manage your shipping and handling.

8. Inventory Management

Customers hate backorders, but many retailers choose to continue to sell products that they have backordered. Every retailer needs to make their own policy decision and make sure that their e-commerce storefront will support their policy. Many storefronts provide the ability to upload an Excel spreadsheet of stock quantity information and allow you to configure the storefront to support your backorder policy. For example, the storefront may disable a product if it is out of stock, indicate to the customer that the item is out of stock and not allow them to make an order, or indicate the item is out of stock and allow them to proceed with their order.

9. Application Integration
   • Quicken or QuickBooks. When your storefront is integrated with your accounting software, your customers orders will automatically appear in the correct account.
   • UPS/FedEx. Some storefronts allow you to get an accurate shipping quote in real-time. Others will allow you to schedule the pick-up of a package and print the correct shipping label automatically.
   • Payment Gateways. Why process payments manually when your storefront can do it for you? Though make sure your storefront supports your existing payment gateway.
   • Order Management. If you have been selling through a catalog you probably already have an order management system. Many storefronts provide direct integration to popular order management systems. Other storefronts will allow you to export a simple text file of your orders for import into your order management system. Having a separate a order management system can present difficulties when customers cancel or change their orders, as the updates to the order may not be reflected in the storefront without manual intervention.

In most cases you will not throw out the other software you use when you starting selling online through an e-commerce storefront. Many storefronts can play with your existing software packages to make your life easier.

10. Marketing Support

How do you market your products online? If you are buying keywords through popular search engines like Google and Yahoo, you will probably want to be able to measure the effectiveness of each of the keywords. Many storefronts are smart enough to figure out when customers visit your site from keyword searches on search engines, and can help you gauge the effectiveness of those marketing campaigns.

Choosing an e-commerce storefront system is not easy. But finding a suitable e-commerce storefront much easier if you examine your current business processes and select a storefront that allows you to continue to do business the way you do today.