I have been building web sites for many years but to be honest I have not dealt too much with e-commerce sites. It is definitely a niche specialty within the web design community and designers along with UX people (like myself) look at e-commerce sites differently. You have to not only deal with getting the site found on the web but the individual products and measuring conversion along with where buyers drop out of the process. All of these things lead to building better sites that sell (which is their job) but I had never gone at doing every single step for my own business before. Until Now.
I am currently producer of a film called Browncoats: Redemption that is raising money for a few select charities with the release of a DVD and receiving donations. We are approaching this as a package donation so we will have a combination of products and services. We are hoping to move 32,000 DVD’s (yeah, that is a lot). This meant we were gonna need an online store.
In my research of many different products and solutions, the main components became clear and I thought I as I start this series we call Building My Online Store Series.
Five Key Components of an e-Commerce Site (starting at the bottom up):
1.) Merchant Account – First order of business is getting approved to have a bank account that will accept these online payments. This part of your business account is called a “Merchant Account”. We got ours through our bank as is the case most of the time. You can also do a search for “credit card processing” and there are lots of good companies. If you want to go directly to the source for one provider, you can get them through providers like Network Solutions Merchant Services.
2.) Payment Gateway – This is basically the online processor that hooks into both your customer’s credit card account and your internet merchant account. The gateway verifies information, transfers requests and authorizes credit cards in real time. Leading providers to smaller merchants include FirstData, Authorize.Net, CyberSource and VeriSign. You can also use things like PayPal or Google Checkout, but if you are building a more robust site, I would skip them and use a provider like previously mentioned.
3.) Secure Certificate - This is the most esoteric piece of the e-commerce site supply chain. Its geeky name is called Secure Socket Layer or SSL. It is what makes web sites have the “https://” on the front of the web address and the padlock that shows that the transaction is encrypted and secure. It does two main things – let’s people know that the site they are putting their credit card info on is secure and gives customers piece of mind that you are not a fly-by-night operation. There are many different levels of certificates and we selected Network Solutions nsProtect Basic since we are small non-profit and didn’t need much.
4.) The Web Site Itself – This is where your ninja web development skills come into play or you bring in a third party to design it for you. I would honestly use a third-party since there are so many things that you might not know about when it comes to an e-commerce site. Many entrepreneurs (including me) swear by some of the bigger names in web hosting, we went with Network Solutions hosting package nsHosting. Providers like this are great because they offer direct contact–especially important if your site has an outage.
5.) Storefront Software – This where the rubber hits the road. Merchant Account? Check. Payment Gateway? Check. SSL Certificate? Check. Web site hosting? Check. Now you have to build the store, but again there are many options. Our site is a WordPress installation so instead of the full out-of-the box e-commerce storefront, we went for a solid market leader plugin that has the connectors to our payment gateway and handles the USPS shipping automatically. In this case, we used Shopp which is perfect for our plans in the coming year. I will cover using this product vs. the other e-commerce products in a future post in the series.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Network Solutions is a sponsor of the film and has provided many of the services for us to use. I am just sharing this experience for all interested in learning how this stuff works.
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