How To Choose An Ecommerce Solution

How To Choose An Ecommerce Solution

To have an online store is to be present where all the action is happening. Buyers are increasingly shopping online. The big question is: what ecommerce solution best suits your need? Here are some pointers:

How big is your business?

If you’re a small business selling very few products, it makes sense to save yourself the cost and hassle of setting up a store, managing logistics and marketing. Join an existing ecommerce platform instead, suggests Sudhir Rohilla, CEO, Unyscape Infocom. Popular options are Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon or eBay.
 
Businesses with a mid-sized catalogue would do well to integrate an online store with their corporate website. Ecommerce enablers like Shopify, Yahoo! Merchant Solution, BigCommerce, Kartrocket.com, Zepo, Buildabazaar, etc. make it fairly easy to upload photos and catalogue products, and offer visitors a good experience.

Rohilla recommends companies with a larger catalogue to separate their ecommerce portal from their corporate website. Both paid and free-to-use open source options exist to create dedicated stores, such as Zen Cart, Magento and WordPress eShop.

Advanced solutions can support multiple payment gateways, personalised marketing based on the location and past transactions of customers, and even integrate the store with the business software.

How big is your budget?

Unless you’re an accomplished programmer and designer, developing and operating your own site is obviously more expensive than opting for a do-it-yourself subscription service, not to mention a free solution or selling on a platform like Flipkart, etc.

“A custom-developed solution on the Magento Enterprise edition could cost you $ 15,000 yearly (close to INR 10 lakhs) while a smaller subscription-based solution like Shopify could cost between $14 and $995 yearly,” shares Rohilla.

You get what you pay for. Know that the free options do not provide enough functionalities and support for large shops.

How tech savvy are you?

Shopify, Zepo, etc. are marketed as do-it-yourself solutions. Even so, you may need some help to set up your shop or to customise it.

Darshan Patodi opted to set up Yellowfashion.in using Shopify but soon found that it didn’t support Cash on Delivery as a payment option nor did it offer delivery pin code validation, among other things. So, he decided to separate ordering, cataloguing and store management from order processing, inventory, billing and in-depth reporting. Shopify handles the former while purpose-written code handles the latter.

“We hired a freelance coder to get the store up and running. Thereafter we are managing our shop without a technology person,” shares Patodi.

How scalable is the solution?

An e-commerce website is only as good as its ability to handle peak traffic. As your online shop becomes more popular, it needs to scale with minimal effort.

Ask yourself these questions to evaluate if the solution meets your needs, says Rohilla:

  •     What is the peak number of visits (or open sessions) the site has supported?
  •     How many orders per day does the site take?
  •     How many page views per visit does each visitor make on average?
  •     How big or complex is the product catalogue, and how many categories, products, and stock-keeping units (SKUs) does it hold?

Over the last year Patodi’s store Yellowfashion has seen traffic almost double. It has scaled very well.

“We have faced no hitches even as traffic and transactions grew to almost one million sessions, eight million page views and 10,000 transactions in July’15, from 0.45 million sessions, 4 million page views and 4,000 transactions in July 2014,” says Patodi.

How flexible is the product cataloguing system?

Putting yourself out there attractively and purposefully is the key to online selling success. A flexible product cataloguing system helps.

“Ask if the catalogue can represent different product categories and subcategories and products with different attributes, and supports a variety of product definitions,” says Rohilla.

Also ask whether a single product or subcategory can exist in multiple categories without data duplication?

How effective is the search tool?

Most customers rely heavily on the search box to find products they need in a jiffy. Users expect the search to not only find products they are looking for but also throw up products they are likely to be interested in—based on their search keywords. A search experience that works for customers can significantly increase online revenue because it will push meaningful products.

So, Rohilla recommends evaluating the ability of the search function to deliver a compelling personalised search experience. A good tool is robust enough to handle spelling typos and smart enough to decipher similar keywords and search for likenesses. Search reports should inform the business about customer preferences to help put out a better product selection.

Will you need an app?

Shopify and other providers offer a host of apps to enhance customer experience and reach out to more customers. “We have opted for cart customisation to facilitate targeted product offers, custom discounts based on cart value or number of products, etc,” says Patodi, and cautions you may need assistance to set up these apps.

Alternatively, you might opt for a custom-built app.

“Shopify and other such options are only good for people who want to get started on the platform. They don’t allow complete flexibility or customisation,” says Aditya Gupta, Co-Founder, iGenero.

A good app will load fast, allow users to search through thousands of products in a jiffy, permit one click check-out, and be configured minutely to enhance users’ experience, according to Gupta.

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