What are the essential components of an online store?
04/04/11 | Kentucky Business Network
Many small businesses are trying to move aspects of their business to the web in order to be more competitive and take their business to the next level. The internet can be great for small businesses, as it can help become a platform for marketing, increasing sales, building brand engagement, providing directions and maps to real-world locations and much more.
Selling online can be a neccessity for some businesses for all the reasons mentioned above. Below is a list of the essential components for a robust, online store.
Essential eCommerce components
- Product catalog. You must have an organized store unless you have only a few products. Navigation within your product catalog should be clear and browsable
- Product attributes. Customers need to learn and study the product prior to purchase. These attributes are generally accepted as a must: product name, category, description, price, and photo / image.
- Check out. The eCommerce checkout needs to provide a way to take payment, append relevant taxes (if necessary), compute shipping and handling costs, provide a sub-total of the amount due, collect billing and shipping information
- Reporting & order tracking. For small stores, you can rely on Paypal or Google Checkout for the order tracking and customer info collection. Larger more robust stores will be better off with a way to store all customer information and be aware when orders come in. Some stores have a way to track the status of the order through the fulfillment and shipping stages.
- For non-remote payments (like Paypal and Google Checkout), security is vital. You must consider the use of encryption HTTPS, at a minimum.
Other eCommerce options
- Inventory systems
- Point of sale connections. For example, connect and interact with RMS
- Product popularity rating
- Featured products to be dynamically displayed on high-trafficked pages
- Suggested products for cross site marketing
- CRM capabilities – tracking and reporting on customers
- Discounts or coupons
- Live UPS, FedEx or USPS automatic rate calculator – and product dimension and weight attributes
- Limit orders to specific countries
