Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach and many eCommerce sites are losing much overseas business due to the usability of their site to international customers. Foreign consumers may have heard about your site and are able to find it easily but any marketing employed by your business will be wasted if they cannot connect with the content on your site, preferring instead to use a local site. Research has suggested that internet users are four times more likely to purchase from a website that communicates in their own language and over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English so connecting to these non English speaking countries will potentially double your audience and hopefully double your sales!

Localisation refers to designing your website in a way that can be adapted for and is appropriate to international customers. Taking into account language and cultural differences will allow you to communicate with more customers worldwide and increase sales. Applications can be localised to different levels depending on the user group or culture you expect to use your site. You may wish to keep the content of your site the same but translate local measures such as currency or time or you may decide to translate the product text and terminology to suit the appropriate country. Some eCommerce sites even go as far to change colours, images and symbols to suit the target culture as customers perceptions of service quality differ from country to country. For example, The colour red means error, stop or warning in western culture however this isn’t the case for Asian countries. In pursuing a global market, businesses should be sensitive to elements such as this. If you understand their local cultures, how they use technology and their expectations you will most likely be successful in selling to them.

Even simple differences between variants of English can make or break a sale. For example, British English and American English obviously differ with British using shopping basket and Americans preferring shopping cart and spelling variations such as colour and color. Customers who recognize that the site is based abroad will become less trusting of it, hence less likely to purchase from it. This isn’t a case of automatic translation but researching your target markets expectations and customs.

When did you last check your eCommerce site for these issues? Can you get more sales from applying simple changes?

Competitor analysis involves learning more about the businesses that function around the same target demographic as you enabling you to assess their strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying opportunities and threats to your own business.

Often businesses become obsessed with competitor analysis whilst others can ignore what their competitors are doing completely. A healthy medium would be to track competition, react to changes but focus on your own plans.  After identifying the main competition in the market, it is useful to recognize the threats they pose, their company objectives and strategies and their weaknesses, this can only add to the strength of your own business.

It is useful to create a competitor profile for each of your competitors as it enables you to gather all relevant information in one place allowing you to formulate an effective strategy to implement, monitor and adjust where needed. Competitor profiles include their background, financials, products, marketing, facilities, personnel and corporate and marketing strategies. Knowing your competition’s planned strategies allows you to plan a response through your own strategy whilst at the same time revealing strategic weaknesses.

We have identified accessorize as the main market leader for this type of jewellery, however there are many that sell handmade jewellery offering similar products to Eliot Turner that are certainly market competition.

Here are the ones I have identified as the biggest competition:

The Spotty Dog Shop

Lisa's Handmade Jewellery

FarFallina

Purple Label

Pia Jewellery

Silver Wire Designs

We plan to create competitor profiles for our competition; however, we do not want to concentrate too much on what our competition is doing instead focusing our time and energy on our own plans.

On Monday 29th June, Justin and I spoke at the SuperMondays event held at Newcastle University about the eCommerce experiment to a crowd of approximately 40 people. Thanks to Ross Cooney for inviting us to take part.

We are lucky to already have a web developer on board for this project (me ), but if we didn’t have this experience in house, then we would need to look elsewhere. Choosing a web developer will depend quite heavily on your budget, expectations and the scale of your operation.

Once you know what your budget is, what you expect/what from the web developer and you know just how big the site will be, and then you will need to go out and find a web developer. This could be anyone from a freelancer, to a small web company, to a much larger web company, and this decision mostly will depend on your budget. Most importantly you need to be sure that the developer you choose is capable of handling the work and will be able to help you grow.

Here are our guidelines for how we feel a company or individual should go about looking for someone to develop their new eCommerce site.

1. Work out a realistic budget for what you would like to spend on the development work
2. Work out what your expectations/requirements for the web developer are. (This could be anything from custom stock integration to a specific payment provider).
3. Determine how big your site will be (in terms of products and visitors), as this will determine the right software and systems to use for your site.

After this, you should have a good idea in your mind of what sort of web developer you require. When choosing between a freelancer, a small company or a large company, it is necessary to keep in mind your requirements now, but also your future requirements:

A freelancer would be an ideal low cost solution initially, however as your company grows and the workload increases, it may lead to them having to pass the work onto a small company in order to better facilitate your requirements. By this I mean that they might not have the current capacity to handle your increasing workload and they may not want to grow larger than being just freelance.

A large company would be a very expensive solution initially, but they would be able to handle the growth and would possibly have more experience in dealing with large projects and be able to help you grow your business quickly in a well thought out manner.

A small company would not be the cheapest solution, but they would also bring to the table the capacity to grow alongside your new ecommerce business.

Once you have these sorted out, you need to then choose a web developer, it is best to approach a number of different companies/people and get quotes from all three.

• Ask to see examples of their previous work.
• Ask if you can speak to some of their current clients to see what they think.
• Ask them what makes them stand out above all the rest and what sort of technology will they be using to run your site.
• Ask them how they would intend to host your site, as you want to make sure they are using a secure solution that is backed up every day with the backups being kept for at least a week.
• Make sure you tell them as much detail about your project as possible and ensure they have an exact specification to work to when calculating a quote or writing a proposal for you.
• When you get a proposal back from the company, read it carefully and watch out for hidden terms and conditions and ensure that everything you want is in the proposal. As anything not specifically written in the proposal document is 99% of the time, not included in the price.

Golden Rule: It is important to remember that the cheapest option is not always the most sensible option (“pay peanuts, get monkeys“). However, it is still important to remember that big companies will charge more because they have more overheads involved.

It is also prudent to make sure you are not paying for a ‘big brand’ company to work on your site, when they might not necessarily do anything different to a smaller brand company.

I’m not saying here that you should throw away your money, but you must make sure that the decision you make is not solely based on cost, but is a compromise of quality and keeping costs within your budget.

If you are building your own eCommerce site, then very early on, you will make a decision on the technology that will make the basis of your site.

Your first decision is to determine if you wish to develop your own system from scratch, or do you want to use readily available open source software and adapt it to meet your requirements. This usually comes down more to your situation, budget and time frame. If you have a short time frame and a low budget, then you really don’t have time to be building your own software, so you need to use open source.

In our case, we will be developing our own system from scratch (or rather rebuilding our old system from scratch), this is because we have time to work on the development of the system and it gives us an opportunity to blog about the system as we go, explaining how and why we did things as we go.

Open source software is a quick and cheap alternative to get your eCommerce system up and running, and some of the software currently available (magento, etc) is phenomenal. One of the major downsides that we find with open source eCommerce systems, is that generally they don’t quite fit with how you want to do things, and if you don’t know them inside out, it makes it much harder to change things to be more suited to your needs.

We also chose not to use open source technology as we would need to invest a significant amount of time familiarising ourselves with the system and how it works and how the coding works, so that if we decide to integrate it with a stock control system, we would be able to do so. This all takes up valuable time, which by the time we’re confident enough to be writing useful additions to the open source software, we could have just written a system ourselves that is tailored to our exact needs, but if we do need to modify it, it’s easy because we built it, so we can change it 10x quicker than anyone else could.

Once you have made a choice between open source and developing your own system, the next choice will only really relate to those that chose to build their own system, as choosing an open source software package will have already dictated to you what language will be used.

If you are building your own system however, you will need to decide what DB to use and what programming language you want to use in order to the develop the system. One of the most common combinations is a MySQL database with PHP, however Ruby on Rails is proving to be a big contender for PHP and is certainly worth a look in.

Because we have more experience in working with PHP, I chose to continue down the route of using PHP in conjunction with a MySQL database as it will enable me to quickly work through the development without having to learn new things by using ROR. At the end of the day, I think that whatever technology you choose to use, will not make much of a difference to the end result, it is just about what you are more familiar with and how confident you are that you can develop such a complex system using that technology.

It is a good idea to plan out the development of the software, so that you can keep on top of things and keep track of where you should be with the development, so that you can deliver the software in time to launch your new online store. With this in mind, I would suggest creating an implementation schedule, where you list all of the tasks and items that need to be built/developed in order to make the system, and then prioritise these, setting targets based on how long you think it will take to make. An important thing to remember is that you should prioritise features that are considered to be CORE functionality features, and then once these features have been completed, then you can start to look at features that are not a necessity to launch, but may well make your admin life easier.

In order for our eCommerce site to run smoothly and have good load times, we need to start with a good infrastructure to work with.

We will be using our own hosting solution, which will be hosted in a Data Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The hosting infrastructure comprises of the following:

• Mail Server: This is a standalone mail server which is shared across all our clients who use email. It runs Centos 5.2 Linux and uses PostFix for mail.

• Load Balancer: This is a load balancing server which also acts as one of our name servers, it will be used to distribute the load of traffic visiting our site between our two web servers. It runs Centos 5.2 Linux and uses Bind for the name server and Pound for load balancing.

• Web Server 1: This Web server is the master web server and runs Centos 5.2 in conjunction with a LAMP stack. The web server runs two quad core 2.5Ghz Intel processors with 4GB of DDR2 Ram and 3×160GB hard disks in Raid 5.

• Web Server 2: This Web server is the slave web server and runs Centos 5.2 in conjunction with a LAMP stack. The web server runs two quad core 2.5Ghz Intel processors with 4GB of DDR2 Ram and 3×160GB hard disks in Raid 5. This server replicates all files and databases etc from web server 1 using rsync.

This server infrastructure is extremely robust as it provides us with a complete failover system, by using the load balancer, if web server one were to fail (touch wood it doesn’t), then web server two should be able to take over where it left off. Our site will be replicated onto web server two throughout the day and we make an offsite backup every night to our office server via rsync which is kept for a week.

Content management within an eCommerce site is often quite difficult to get right. The majority of eCommerce systems either skip over it entirely, or bolt on a poor / cut down CMS as more of an after thought than really planning how to make it work right. Another reason may well be that the developer simply doesn’t have the time to deal with functionality that isn’t always classed as a ‘CORE’ requirement.

A common way of dealing with this is to install a purpose built content management system along side an eCommerce system, but this makes things ultimately more complicated as the systems may differ significantly and no one (client or developer) wants to have to log into two different systems every time they want to change things.

Currently, we have our own content management system and we have our own eCommerce system. When it comes to eCommerce sites we have tried running a CMS alongside an eCommerce system, which didn’t work at all, we’ve tried putting a small ‘bolt-on’ CMS into the eCommerce system, which also didn’t work very well and required a developer to add new pages etc, the client only had a simple content box.

When we redevelop the new system, I intend to integrate a simple, yet effective and reasonably powerful CMS within the system. It will come with features along the lines of the following:

• Ability to add/remove pages and folders
• Ability to add content items to specified pages
• Ability to upload multiple images/files etc and link to them from the content.
• Will have set xhtml templates based on the design of the ecommerce site, that will be set by the developer and then the client can use them.
• Set up sections within the templates that can be edited by the user.
• Will use the same CSS as the site, but can be edited by the admin.

By working to integrate this from the start, it should make things a lot simpler.

We have always used our own software for our ecommerce sites from the beginning. Since then the system has been added to and modified as and when required to add or improve functions on a very ad hoc basis. We had been planning various upgrades to the system in order to improve it’s functionality and capabilities, but I quickly came to the conclusion that perhaps there was a better way to go.

After spending some time looking around for open source alternatives to our system (which there are some extremely smart packages out there i.e. magento, etc), I felt that these solutions would become more of a problem than a solution. We would need to invest a significant amount of time into familiarizing ourselves with the code and how the system works and the processes involved. Without this it would be very difficult for us to make changes to the underlying system if we needed to add to the functionality to meet a clients needs.

Deciding that our current system wasn’t up to the job and the open source alternatives weren’t going to be suitable for what we needed, I took the decision to completely redevelop our software from scratch. This would enable us to eradicate any problems from the old system, implement new functionality and most importantly, improve the usability of the admin area to make it as simple to use as possible.
I will be building the new system alongside and around the ecommerce experiment site, this will enable us all to personally use the system day to day as part of the experiment, so we will quickly be able to iron out any bugs or usability issues.

The plan for the development is to build up a basic framework for the admin area and the database, ensuring it is functional and robust enough for our needs. I will then work with Ryan to integrate the new design for the site with the system, whilst completely rewriting the code that deals with the checkout process, making the flow from basket -> checkout -> order confirmation much more simpler for the customers to use.Technorati Profile