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Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 1:25:01 PM

Zensee

Posts: 1564
Joined: 9/4/2004
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Hello CMers. People pick the wonderful, varied and twisted minds here for all sorts of advice and now it's my turn. Hopefully this information will be of use to others here, besides myself.

I am starting a small business selling a modest catalogue of lower priced items ($20 ish). We would be shipping orders, mostly received over the internet, to worldwide addresses. We are based in Canada so if you have any experience here particularly, that would be great.

What good and bad experiences have people had with various methods of receiving online orders and payment (paypal, third party billing, setting up your own e-commerce module...)? Any pitfalls or dangers to guard against? Can you recommend any particular services?

Your advice and perspectives are most welcome and I thank you for any assistance you can offer.

Z.

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 1:29:34 PM

SugarMyChurro

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Strangely enough, you would learn a lot about small internet businesses and international orders by reading the forums here:
http://www.bricklink.com/messageList.asp

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 1:32:45 PM

Zensee

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Ha ha - thanks SMC - I never would have thought BRICK for e-commerce resources. LOL.

PS: I am doing my own research too but sorting out the positive and negative hype from the reality is tricky.

Z.

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"Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." (proverb)

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 1:43:42 PM

DomKen

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Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
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Your choices really come down to three choices.

1) Buy/use an ISP provided eCommerce package. Probably your best option for all but the lowest volume etailers. You'll need an account with a credit card acceptor, if you are a brick and mortar operation already you'll already have it presumably. I'd avoid paypal if possible since their fees are significantly higher than traditional credit card services.

2) A custom solution. If you like writing code or know someone who will work cheap this might be an option. Time consumptive and support and features would be an issue. at the size you're talking about probably not an option.

3) Co-branding. lots of people sell online through Amazon and eBay. I don't know much about the process for Amazon but I've set several businesses up on eBay. It's a pretty basic estore setup that of course looks like and is acccessible through eBay. The plus side is your inventory would come up on eBay searches and that will drive traffic to your store. The downside is eBay has fees you'd have to pay and paypal is virtually required on eBay. The balancing factor is no domain name to buy or hosting service to pay.

Finally no matter how you do it educate yourself on international shipping. Shipping by the big guys, UPS, FedEx etc., will keep the hassles to a minimum you should still know the basics so you could fill out the forms and take a package to the post office.

Hope this helps.

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 1:57:19 PM

Zensee

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Joined: 9/4/2004
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Good points DK - and thanks for the break down.

We are resurrecting an old business and have a pre-existing .com website for our store front but no means of receiving orders yet, other than by email. We anticipate needing to be able to handle fairly high volumes of orders in the near future, several hundred to several thousand a week, so something fairly automated and seamless would be nice. Order comes in - shipping label comes out.

I like the idea of tapping into Amazon and Ebay but we really want to draw people to our website (another set of issues, I realise, and ones we do know a bit about).

Z.

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 2:35:33 PM

DomKen

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Several thousand orders a week is pretty high volume for most estores. I would definitely take a look at one or another ecomerce software packages. Before choosing a package you need to choose a host ISP so you'll know what server OS and database you'll have. At roughly $20k gross per week you will need a fairly robust platform and I'd definitely go with a standard credit card acceptor over paypal, although if the package supports paypal directly it might be worth having the option available.

You should look into finding a website developer to handle customizing the packages provided pages to be how you want your store to look. Generally a pretty easy task for a good designer. At that volume having a pro photograph your catalog may be something to investigate.

On the subject of hosting, several thousand sales per week means a fairly large number of hits and a fairly large download so you want to make sure your hosting agreement is sufficient that you don't go over your limit and go offline. Personally I'd find a host with an account with a reasonable monthly bandwidth that will simply charge you extra if you go over. Although avoiding being locked into a contract that you can't change if you find you need significantly more or less bandwidth is also a rather important part of any hosting deal. As to storage on the db and web servers, you'll need to see what the web designer thinks as he'll have access to all your images and a good idea of how much data you'll be storing. With storage being so cheap erring on the highside shouldn't be prohibitively expensive.

good luck.

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 5:12:41 PM

Zensee

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Wow - thank you for the details and perspectives DK - much appreciated.

So many considerations.

Z.

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"Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water." (proverb)

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 6:39:17 PM

NeedToUseYou

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You should sell on ebay, amazon, etc... as well as your own site ideally. Most use ebay to pull repeat customers to their real website for future purchases. So, you sell a widget on ebay, you put a insert in the package with a coupon for their first order off your real website(just make it equal to what the ebay fees would be or thereabouts). Then they no longer go to ebay to buy your widgets, and buy it from you direct and you save the trouble of getting raped by ebay. But you should keep a presence their always, as some people don't look anywhere but ebay, out of laziness.

You definitely have to get a real UPS, or FEDEX account, if you ship that much and if most of the packages are going to fit into one weight dimension classification, you'll be paying way way less than the list rates. You should have that before you launch, the saving are crazy compared to what they charge the public. Call both of them and they'll send out an agent to negotiate with you, and take the best offer. My experience having used both Fedex and ups, is fedex drivers don't toss your packages as much, and are more apt to please. UPS drivers tend to not give a shit. But UPS seems to have a better back-end system, and less glitches during the actual shipment. We use fedex, because I just can't deal with watching packages literally being thrown in the truck. We've had UPS drivers do that without batting an eye.

PayPal isn't that bad if you are pushing the volume, I haven't looked at the rates in awhile, but believe on over a 100K a month it bottoms out 1.9%or (2.1% can't remember I haven't looked for months) plus .30 cents a transactions, the base rate is 2.9% for a new account. But it may be cheaper to get a real card processor, but not much and you have to jump through more hoops with a regular processor in order to get it going. We've had very few problems related to paypal, despite all the horror stories you here about, you simply must ship with tracking within 7 days of receiving their money, and that takes care of 90% plus of the problems.

As far as integration, I looked for one that would do what you described order comes in label comes out. I found some that were way way expensive, but all lacked either store integration, or ebay or amazon or Fedex support, or whatnot, so eventually I just made my own. It took about a year. But we deal with items that must be individually listed and displayed, if you are dealing with 100% uniform product it will be easier to find a solution. In our case we needed the ability to treat entries under a particular model number as a distinct item, while carrying some of the attributes of the model number with it. They don't really design things for that.

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RE: Small Business E-Commerce - 3/17/2008 7:50:05 PM

Bound2One

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I worked as office manager for a small company which sells a niche product. I know a bit about expanding into amazon and ftd and other outlets. Neither are easy options - it's not as easy as calling them and saying "hey, I want to be on your site." You have to be approved by their buyers, and even when approved, they make you jump through hoops to sell with them. BUT the payoff is worth it in the end. Ebay is, obviously, a much easier option.

As far as the website goes - I was with the company when they launched a new site. You definitely need a developer to sit down and design what you need. Credit cards were processed automatically through the website, which is what I'd recommend for you. We also took orders from retailers, and we were able to run the credit through their website - easy peasy. Oh, and with the website you'll need something like 'hacker safe' which is a safety feature which protects your customer's information. I'm not sure how it works, and I know it's not cheap, but apparently to have a successful website without liability to your company you'll need it.

Other considerations: Do you have a good warehouse? (this can make or break you!) How are you handling shipping? Have you negotiated bulk pricing with the shippers? Are you shipping to the US? Are your products made in Canada? If not, are you familiar with Customs regs? Canada regs were very difficult when I was shipping to a retailer - I had to send an estimate with all sorts of detailed info on the estimate for their records. What accounting software are you going to use - a Quickbooks-type?

If you have any other questions that come to mind, feel free to PM me. I am in the States and only dealt with shipping to Canada, so some things may be different, but it was amazing to me how detailed running a small business was, and how many times problems or issues popped up that were never expected!

Best of luck to you!

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