This article aims to set out the range of strategies available to small to medium New Zealand businesses (in particular, existing TechWriter clients, but in principle to any business) who want a website that is capable of selling products and services online, including the transaction of payments. I have helped make many sites with e-commerce capabilities ranging from very simple up to complex and powerful. Most Techwriter clients do not have such sites, either because they don't need them or because they cost too much. This article is aimed mainly at the latter group.
Why would you be thinking about this?
Some of you may have heard customer feedback that they liked your site but would like it even more if they could buy directly from it, or pay for services or subscriptions or enrolments or bookings, using their credit card on the spot. If you think you are missing out on, say, more than $1000 worth of business a year because of a lack of payment facilities on your site, then you should talk with me (or other webmasters) about whether an entry-level package would suit.
A conventional shopping cart with ecommerce payments, programmed just for you, can turn a $500 website into a $5000 one in no time. However, this need not be so. In many cases, certain compromises or limitations are perfectly acceptable and are not a hindrance at all to sweet operation; and a small, inexpensive packaged solution may be ideal.
In this article, I'll start with the cheapest (and usually simplest) solutions and work upwards. But first, let's identify the three main types of e-commerce capabilities, and component elements:
1. The ability for the purchaser to send their credit card details to you, via e-mail and your server, with confidence that those details will not be captured by a hacker. An alternative is to use a third-party global payment processing system such as PayPal which processes transactions for you so you never need to see credit card information.
2. A "shopping cart" facility enabling several products (on one or many pages) to be selected and accumulated into a page (the "basket" or "cart"), with total cost calculated, unit numbers entered, etc, and then sent to you along with payment information. Ideally it also maintains customer accounts for ongoing marketing purposes, plus back-office functions such as order tracking.
3. A database of available products in categories. This is maintained by yourself (or me on your behalf) to include product details, prices etc, which are read as needed by the website program as the shopping cart is filled.
Which capabilities do you need? All or just some?
Many websites (such is tourist accommodation or book publishers) need only the first capability. They have only one item (or a very small number), such as a room booking, and do not need a shopping cart or database. Websites with a small number of products (perhaps less then 30 in a narrow range of categories) probably do not need a database. If the products are simple in nature, requiring just a name, price and description, then a very simple shopping cart will suffice. If products have more complexities -- perhaps there are multiple product categories and subcategories, and sizes or colours for each unit -- then a more powerful shopping cart and either an integrated or a separate database will be required.
Before we get into these details, I must make it clear that whatever e-commerce system you implement, you must separately set up some mechanism for accepting and receiving payments. For many, this is the ability to electronically "zipzap" credit cards, and to do this you'll need to set up facilities with your bank. For retail outlets or point-of-sale users such as motels, you will use whatever mechanism you have already for credit card sales; for new merchants not already geared for card payments, you will need to talk to your bank about how you will handle such payments, which may involve using an online service such as DPS to handle it all for you for a monthly fee. The cheapest technique is to join PayPal (or a similar international payment clearance system) to handle it all for you, though this may slightly limit the number of customers prepared to use it - credit cards are more universal and some people think PayPal purchases is only for members.
1. Secure transmission of credit card details
Most of you have some sort of "Contact Us" form on your website, enabling a visitor to enter whatever details you request. In theory, there is nothing stopping you including the entry of credit card details in that form. However, because of the fear of hacking into emails while they are being sent to the server or from the server to you or while sitting on the server, most Internet users will not enter such details unless they know the pathway and the server are secure.
To implement a secure server, all you need to do is a sign up to a secure server hosting service, which normally cost around $10-$20 per month more than static hosting -- a small price to pay if you expect to make some sales on the site.
To implement secure email transmission, you also need a method of encrypting the credit card number so that even if it is intercepted it is virtually impossible to be decrypted. I'm a reseller of a simple facility for encrypting these details and providing you, the website owner/operator, with a unique key to decrypt the details with a few mouse clicks. This decryption program costs $250 plus GST, and is worth it if you are serious about offering your customers a secure trading environment.
For higher-volume websites (say, more than 30 sales expected per day), it pays to use an online clearance service such as DPS (mentioned a few paragraphs back.) The extra fee is compensated for by a sweet-running systems and no need for you to do any manual processing.
As mentioned above, an ultralow-cost method of ensuring security is to use a third-party processing system such as PayPal. All transactions take place within their secure facilities, and all you see are deposits in your PayPal account. In this case, your own server does not need to be secure.
2. Shopping carts
Although there are many options available, I have had experience with a few types of shopping cart systems which cover a broad range of applications.
2a. Really cheap ones (under $500 all up). There are several types that I'm familiar with, and they're described in more detail in another article of mine, Cheap Ways of adding Online Sales to your Website. If you're definitely not interested in spending more than $1000, then head off to that article.
2b. Low cost, functional packages. I've come across several shopping cart packages in recent years which provide the most common functionalities and customisation required by smaller businesses but which cost only around the $1000 mark. The number of such self-management packages grows by the month, so to find one that suits your budget and requirements, I suggest you google "shopping cart packages in new zealand" as a starting point.
2c. A Custom Package. For some websites, a packaged solution simply cannot work because the products and services available cannot be easily categorised and defined within a fixed-shape database. For example, one of my clients selling fireguards has a web purchasing facility which calculates the cost of a fireguard after the buyer enters the dimensions for their particular room. This required special programming to do the calculations. In these cases, the only sensible solution is a customised program.
3. Databases
The ability to store and organise data about your products and services, and about the customers who send their details to you through your website, opens up a virtually unlimited range of features and services that you can offer - far too many for me to attempt to summarise here. Several of my clients have very useful databases as the foundation for their website activities.
Unfortunately, most databases have to be designed and built to suit particular purposes, and require designers who have significant training and expertise in that area, so they tend to be much more expensive than static websites. Normally I would talk with a client about a database only if it was the obvious best option to achieve the required outcome.
But wait, there's More (or less?). . .
This article aimed to cover the full spectrum of lower-end solutions. For people wanting more information of the sub-$500 options, I've written a separate article which you can read here: Cheap Ways of adding Online Sales to your Website.
