ECommerce site development

ECommerce website for SMEs

The first things that we clarify with any client for their new ECommerce solution are their internet business strategy such as:

• Site objectives

• Site delivery timescale

• Site budget

We need to understand these crucial issues as it is essential that the their new ECommerce site has the desired impact and objectives. To achieve this means an agreed requirements specification must be drawn up as the first stage before anything else is done – any other approach will only lead to confusion and worse.

During the process of ECommerce web site development a vast range of factors, from the obvious and basic to the somewhat more obscure must be considered, for example:

• Have domain names been chosen and domain registration completed?

• Is the hosting requirement understood?

• Do we know the number of templates, images per page, number of pages in site, number of forms?

• In the ECommerce shop what are the likely of items and what are they - real stock or virtual?

• What type of shopping cart software is the best solution?

• Are payment solutions in place or are an Internet merchant account and an online payment gateway required?

• What about business integration issues - stock control, EPOS etc.

• What databases are needed are there any custom design, development, deployment issues?

• Is an Intranet / extranet required too?

• Site maintenance - how is content management going to be dealt with? Who is content to be managed by and what is the likely update frequency?

• What about special content requirements such as RSS feeds, bulletin boards, webcam, music, live chat etc

• What are the EMail requirements for the site and the company, how do they integrate? Will there be an EMail newsletter?

• What about site navigation and pathways?

• How are the basics of copywriting for the web going to be dealt with? What is the number of pages to be written and is there any language localization required?

• What about the standard legals (copyright, disclaimer, privacy)

• What about logos and photography - is it all available, coming from a library or is some work required?

• Are there any directory or link management systems required?

• What sort of tracking and statistics package is required? This is arguably more important than the shopping cart itself. If you do not know how visitors to your website and in the shop are behaving, what turns them on and what turns them off then it is far, far harder to improve sales and site profitability.

• What about site optimization? Positioning, keyword generation, Google XML site map, backlinks etc?

• Is any pay per click marketing to be used?

• How will the process of ECommerce site project management, development and implementation be handled?

A good ECommerce web site developer will help you with all of these often conflicting factors.