Ecommerce,

For all those enthusiastic ecommerce website owners, before you even consider starting an ecommerce website, it will be good that you actually do a thorough research and planning first. The reason is if you do not know who your customers are and how you are going to differentiate yourself from your competitors and what is your marketing strategy; it will be a total waste of time, money and energy to build an ecommerce website. Your ecommerce website will end up as a stale website, not attracting enough customers, let alone sales or profit.

In addition, you also need to consider the operational and maintenance aspects of the ecommerce website. Many new ecommerce business owners made the mistakes that they thought running an ecommerce website is just like running a normal website but an ecommerce website requires more than that. It is equivalent to running a physical store, you need to consider the product, inventory, fulfillment, logistics, customer services, billing and resources required to run and manage an ecommerce website.

We have compiled a checklist as below to guide you for your ecommerce set up. Hopefully you can get a clearer picture of what you required to do before you start.

Market

  1. Who are your customers?
  2. Are you selling to businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C)?
  3. What are the profiles of your customers? E.g gender, age, occupation, income & education

Competition

  1. Who are your competitors?
  2. How you plan your ecommerce website to be different from your competitors?
  3. How you are going to position your ecommerce website?
  4. What is your unique selling point?
  5. What is your competitive advantage?

Other Details

  1. What is your domain name?
  2. Have you sign up a web hosting plan?
  3. Do you have a physical store?
  4. If no, any physical address available so that customers can turn to for help?

Product Details

  1. What are your products?
  1. How you are going to organize your products?
    1. Can they be grouped into main or sub categories?
    2. Can they be grouped into brand, manufacturers or size?
    1. All your products should include the following information:
      1. Product ID, Product Code/SKU, Category, Brand,
      2. Product Name, Product Description, weight, height and dimension
      3. Product Option (e.g. color, material, design)
      4. Pricing (retail price, sales price and shipping price)
    2. Have you taken all the products photos?
      1. Good resolution with at least 72dpi for website
      2. Dimension is 400 pixel (width) x 400 pixel (height)
        This is a recommended size as it will allow your customers to zoom into details of the photo if they want to see the product in detail.
        If you have not taken any photos, it is advisable to hire a good photographer as the quality of the photos will make a huge difference in online sales.
    1. If you are using your suppliers’ or manufacturers’ photos, kindly obtain permission from them to avoid any copyright disputes.
      (Note: Please refrain from copying any photos from the web as it might get you into copyright issues.)

Payment Option

  1. What currencies are you charging?
  1. How would you like your customers to pay?
    1. For e.g. Paypal, Credit Card, Cheque or Money Order?
      (Note: If you are using credit card payment, you will need to apply for Merchant account so that your fund is directly deposited into your account. There is a fee involved in credit card processing such as the subscription fee and transaction fee. The fees vary depending on the credit card companies so do check with them individually.)
  1. Does your product pricing include tax and shipping cost?
  2. Do you provide gift wrapping services?
  3. Is your gift wrapping services free or chargeable?

 

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The above list is not exhaustive, you can check out the part 2 of this article by clicking here.