So you have a business and a website, and now you want to sell some products online. Taking a retail operation online and building a scalable solution can involve several parties if you are going to be successful. The following is an outline of the different parts that go into an ecommerce solution beyond your company’s website (assuming you don’t want to build it all yourself).
From a process standpoint, here is what happens. Your website continues to act as the electronic brochure , engaging potential customers and telling the word about the company. And then:
Your Website: Connects To: The Ecommerce Software/ Hosted Site (Product Information, Shopping Cart Function, Reporting, etc), which Connects To: Your Merchant Account Provider (Credit Card Processor) and Your Order Fulfillment Provider.
PROGRAM SETUP
Ecommerce Software would be “attached” to your site.
All your products available for purchase will be uploaded and maintained as part of the ecommerce software by you or your company’s designate, although appear to be on the your main site from the customer’s perspective.
There would be programming cost with all providers to integrate the ecommerce software into the your site. Some provider’s solutions are simple enough that it could possibly be done “in-house”. Depending on the complexity it will likely cost $2,000 at minimum to have the integration completed by a 3rd party. The software providers either can do the integration or will recommend an authorized vendor to help.
At this point the process for communicating orders from the ecommerce software provider to your ecommerce order fulfillment provider would be established. This will be set up to be transparent to you and is straightforward to accomplish. Depending on the provider there may be some minor programming costs to automate the process. Thru your Logistics Software.
PROCESS DESCRIPTION
The monthly cost for the ecommerce software start at around $200-$300 per month based activity volume (although one provider charges a percentage of $ activity). The amount of products available for sale, amount of bandwidth used, and complexity of the solution all impact cost. We’d need to define the scope of volume to determine a better budgetary number at this point.
