Start by answering five questions.
1) Selling binaryware or hardgoods?
2) Selling a few or hundreds of items?
3) Need shipping and/or tax calculators?
4) Need to take credit cards for payment?
5) Need back-end order processing?
Note the emphasis on "need".
Don't start looking for what you think you want; carefully define your minimal
needs. The appetite for "want" is bottomless. If this is your first internet
store, a modest beginning is warranted, especially because needs will change and
evolve over time. So, try to start simple and build from there.
The "want" appetite is gladly feed by marketing people. Storefronts are
available with all sorts of bells and whistles. Most of them you won't need
and setting up a storefront with a zillion options can be a daunting task.
The question not asked above was "cost?". Naturally the cost of the
storefront software will always be a factor. It can range from free to
thousands of dollars. In this rapidly evolving segment of the software
market, cost and features do not always correlate. There is some excellent
freeware out there, so be sure to look around.
You'll also want to decide the buy or lease question. Some storefronts are
provided as services hosted from the providers site while others are stand-alone
packages that you host from your own site. Stand alone packages can be initially
more costly while leased storefronts will cost more in the long run, sometimes
much more. Stand alone stores will require some page editing using a text editor
or wizards, while hosted stores may provide a browser based on-line editor. Your
preference here depends on how comfortable you are using a text editor and how
desirable you feel it is to remain independent of a particular provider.
Forget about the Internet shopping mall. With a brick and
mortar store, location is everything. Not true on the internet! Here you're
just going to have to bang away at search engines, news groups, related sites,
and anywhere else you can think of to get your store known. Niche markets will
do best. Do not try to compete with the big guys unless you're one of them.
Binaryware or Hardgoods
Selling binary products like downloadable software or music is quite different
from selling hardgoods. With downloadable products you will most often want to
provide immediate URL access for the download; and, with software products, a
registration code. In either case, the storefront will need some way of providing
a download location to specific files once a credit card charge has been authorized.
Packaged storefronts do not handle these requirements well. Back-end customization
is usually required. Look for one of the specialized delivery services if
binaryware is your product.
A few or Many Items
Ideally we would like to make a sale direct from a web page simply by letting the
customer select from a picture of the item; however, this isn't
practical. Usually you have more than one item you want to sell and want to give
the customer choices. You also want to give them the opportunity to buy more
than one of a single item. This means that a "buy" link has to present your
customer with a list of items from which to make selections.
This select list is the single most important feature in storefront software.
The purpose of the list is to allow customers to add items in varying quantities
to a shopping cart. The shopping cart itself is simply the storefront memory for
saving these selections prior to check out.
Generally the select list will display items of a type and category relevant to
the item shown in a "buy" link. For a store with just a few items, this may be
a list of all items for sale. For large stores, this link might open a storefront
sales catalog in a particular department with further choices by product type,
category, and a keyword search.
This select list is almost always derived dynamically from a product database.
The product database can be built into the storefront software itself or it can
be a separate application residing on the storefront host server. Which type is
best suited for your purposes will depend on what back office services are needed
and the availability of a host that will support database connections.
A separate product database can be updated automatically for available quantity
when a purchase is made. The built-in database can't. On the other hand, the
built-in database will not require any special server software. Storefronts using
a built-in database can be hosted anywhere. In either case, you will almost never
be able to directly import existing product records to the storefront database.
Existing records rarely have the kind of information you want on the sell side.
There are some other factors to take into account regarding the storefront
select lists. Does the list allow the customer to make preference choices and does
it support dynamic pricing? That is, if you are selling tee shirts for instance,
you will want to give the customer style choices, but will each style choice allow
the customer to specify size and color? If a particular size is extra money,
can the select list compute a new price by adding to the base price of the item?
If you are selling just a few items, then all customer preference options
could be shown in the select list as separate items. However, this technique
can result in a very long and confusing list if there are a lot of options.
For instance, if you have 10 items for sale and each has five options,
you end up with a list of 50 items.
A good rule is to keep a selection list under 20 items. Longer lists are
confusing. This makes it critical that the storefront software has a means of
dynamically generating selection lists from a product database based on some
combination of description, type, catagory, or keywords in a "buy" link.
One further note on the select list. Don't worry about the look, the color,
background images, etc. As long as the selection list is clean and well
organized, you'll be OK. The list must have at least an item description
and a means for selecting quantity. Thumbnail images of items and an ability to
mark up descriptions with HTML tags or style designations is nice but not
essential. Remember, at this point the customer wants to buy.
