There are several technical elements that need to be in place, and various choices to be made, before your business can receive orders and process transactions online.
Internet commerce is now well-established, and there is a rich choice of solutions available in the market. It is still possible to have a bespoke site developed specially for you, but packaged software is usually a cheaper, faster and lower risk option. When assessing Internet commerce packages, the cost of the technology required to support the package must also be considered to get a full picture. The wrong package may cost £10,000’s extra to service in terms of the infrastructure that it requires.
The alternative to a software package is to purchase a fully managed service. In this case you will pay a monthly charge and often a transaction charge on sales. The big advantage is that the hassle should be removed. This choice should be based on the same principles as that for out-sourcing any service: what are the costs and is this core to my business? There is a prevailing view that only commodity services should be out-sourced, and that a new sales channel needs our understanding and management to succeed.
Actinic Catalog www.actinic.co.uk is a good example of a desktop software package.
Most small companies will end up renting web space on someone else’s server. Medium sized companies can rent or buy an entire server which is permanently attached to the Internet at an Internet Service Provider’s site. Large companies will most likely obtain a leased line to the Internet and run their own server, firewall and so on at their own premises. But are these choices the correct ones?
The true cost of these options ranges from around £200 per annum to multiple £10,000’s, so the decision will make a big difference. Don't look at what the company can afford, but which is the most appropriate. Renting 20MB on a server attached by a 2MB link to the internet can often give a faster service to visitors than renting a 64KB leased line, even though the leased line option may cost 20 times more!
The actual choice of web space for hosting a commerce service is determined by the requirements of the chosen solution.
The next area of choice is whether to base your solution on a "secure" server or not. Secure servers are more expensive, but have the support of most vendors. Most solutions which don’t run on secure servers have no encryption method built in. A few come with their own security and do not require a secure server.
You may be familiar with the "golden key" which appears unbroken at the bottom of your browser when it is operating in "secure" mode. This happens when communicating with a secure server using the RSA algorithm and secure socket layer, SSL.
SSL is frequently touted as the ultimate in security, but some real thought needs to be given to the subject. Information can be intercepted as it travels across the internet, and SSL guards against this. But it is much more likely to be hacked when it is stored at a web site. SSL doesn’t help here as information is decrypted before being stored at the site.
So the important question to ask is whether orders are stored encrypted at the web site; and whether they are store using private key encryption - meaning that the means to break the encryption is not also present at the site. Otherwise if a hacker breaks into the site they can also break the encryption.
This issue provides an excellent illustration of technology versus business tension. Contrary to popular belief, ecommerce is not synonymous with online credit card transactions. There is a choice. Do you base the payment method on online credit card payment processing or on the traditional methods used for say fax orders? The purists will insist that it is not really internet commerce if you haven't got online credit card processing.
The alternative view looks at the cost, and makes a decision based on cost versus saving. Internet commerce is about making sales, not using a particular technological solution.
Processing credit card orders online is convenient, but not necessary unless your bank specifically insists on it. A few seconds of manual processing has to be weighed against the higher cost of a technically more complex approach. This is the business decision to be made. In fact, the only time that online authorisation is an absolute requirement is for consumer sales of digital media which are delivered electronically. This is a minor part of Internet sales today. The cost and demand for online authorisation will change in time, but today’s decisions need to be based on today’s facts.
On the company’s web site you can dynamically generate HTML pages from a database, or you can pre-load static HTML pages, which doesn’t require an online database. The advantages of dynamic generation of HTML are flexibility and advanced features. Not unexpectedly, database vendors will stress these points.
Static HTML has the advantage of providing faster response for viewers. It also enables the web pages to be indexed more easily by the search engines, which will double your search engine hits. Research has shown that around 50% of online buyers will search on a description of the product that they wish to buy.
An excellent halfway house is to generate static HTML pages from a database and then publish them onto the web site. This has many of the advantages of database publishing, has the advantages of static pages and doesn’t require the cost of a database at the web site.
For many years I used to bemoan the system developments which were carried out which didn’t fully integrate into all related systems from day one. Now, probably to the horror of others, I see things differently. Again, the business test must be applied to the technology decision. Integration is expensive and slows things down. The disadvantage of failing to integrate is re-keying effort with associated errors.
The correct decision to make estimates the cost of integration versus the additional running cost of not-integrating. The best solution for start up ecommerce sites is probably to not integrate but make sure that the software purchased is capable of interfacing long-term from the product or stock file of any existing systems and to the order processing system which is used at the present.
Selling online is a great opportunity, but it will only pay if a professional approach to technology is taken. Like all areas of business endeavour, success will only come to those who think before they act, and continue the learning process. May your technology be appropriate!