I seek advice on e- commerce management

[Rainer]

Hi,
my name is Rainer and I run a tool business together with my partner. Most of our goodies are imported from Germany and we approach retailers but also end customers.
However after 2 years of trading in a tough market we want to launch our own website and use the service of a local designer for that purpose.
We intend to offer a online shopping basket for our customers.

At the moment I try to get my head around the necessary administration involved such as contact management ( customers & suppliers), secure payments, order processing, inventory management, sales and order processing and accounting. My ideal would be a solution where we have easy access to all this data and are able to interlink information.

Is this something our web designer should be able to implement or should we involve third parties? And what is the bottomline,how much can it cost?

You might have realised by now that I don't know much about these things and right you are! Your advice/ information in that respect is more then welcome.

I can tell you lots about engineering tools and once the site is up and running you are welcome to have a look and to give me feedback on it.

Regards Rainer

 

[gary]

Hi Rainier

The first thing I would recommend is have a read through the first articles in the Getting Started in E-Commerce series which can be found at http://www.managedweb.com/articles/ecommerce.shtml This will give you an idea of what's involved. It's not as complicated as it may seem!

I'll deal with each of your points in order:

1) Contact management (customers & suppliers)

Your shopping basket software should send the customer an email receipt when they place an order. You can then include a copy of that when you post the order to them. To manage the suppliers (and possibly customers) you may want to invest in some CRM software like ACT or Goldmine, though that is something outside the actual online sales process. Bear in mind too, that there are a number of rules and regulations covering contacting customers andfalling foul of these can lead to a hefty fine!

2) Secure payments

Please see the Getting Started articles above for information on secure payments.

3) Order processing and inventory management

This is usually managed via the shopping basket, and any existing in-house systems you have. The basket simply allows people to buy online - the processing of the order and stock control processes you currently use can very likely remain the same.

4) Sales and order processing and accounting.

This is pretty much the same as point 3 above. Once someone pays online, you will receive a copy of the order and you process it just as if you had received the order by phone or by post. When payment arrives in your bank account, it's the same as any cheque that you paid in. Accounting procedures shouldn't need to change.

5) My ideal would be a solution where we have easy access to all this data and are able to interlink information.

This is possible, and certainly if you use Sage for your accounts at the moment they have a fully integrated system, but as mentioned in the Getting Started articles, your budget is a major factor. A fully integrated solution is likely to be pretty expensive and you have to be sure you're going to make enough sales to make it worthwhile before you spend that sort of money.

I hope that helps, but please feel free to get in touch if you need any further help.

Gary

 

If you are not already using Mail Order, you should be aware that the "Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulation 2000" applies to all transactions that are not carried out face-to-face. In brief, this gives the customer the right to return the goods within 7 days of receipt for no reason and to get a full refund. (We interpret "full" as not including carriage unless the goods were faulty or we made a mistake. I don't think we are within our rights to do this, other than morally, but so far nobody has complained!)

 

If you are not already using Mail Order, you should be aware that the "Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulation 2000" applies to all transactions that are not carried out face-to-face. In brief, this gives the customer the right to return the goods within 7 days of receipt for no reason and to get a full refund. (We interpret "full" as not including carriage unless the goods were faulty or we made a mistake. I don't think we are within our rights to do this, other than morally, but so far nobody has complained!)

incidentally i have had the same "discussion" about deducting carriage when the trading standards office contacted me via my website. they took objection to my statement that a refund was not to include p&p unless faulty or our mistake... but nothing was actually done about it.

andy wright

 

[Rainer]

Hi there,
thanks for your advice which I will follow up as soon as I can
Regards Rainer

 

Have a look at OSCommerce.net, its one clever piece of kit that covers the vast majority of your issues, is well documented and supported and best of all, its free.

There are a ton of designers and programmers who work with it.

http://www.trianic.com/ecart/admin/ (sample backend of an OSC install)

http://www.trianic.com/ecart/ (sample of frontend)

 

[Matt Thorpe]

Hi Rainer,

I am pleased to say that this is all fairly straightforward.

If you are just starting out then I would go for a platform like Shopify. It is low cost and you can manage orders, products, website content, payments, etc. To manage your existing suppliers you can get CRM plugins and for the accounting side you can integrate with Sage fairly easily.

If you needed something a little bit more bespoke to fit around your existing processes then you could opt for a low-cost system that is built for your existing process.

The cost of getting up and running with Shopify would probably be around £3-5k with all the consultancy and search engine optimisation. A bespoke system would be £5k-£7k but payments could be spread out monthly in some instances.

A key area here is the fulfilment of the orders and the customer support. You don't want to risk any damage to your company name.