The Online Selling Game

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1999 by Amee Abel

For instance, if you sell custom-made dolls, you might offer two sizes in any combination of three different skin, hair, and eye colors. Hosting software that allows only two attributes will force you to create separate SKUs for every possible combination. If you already have a physical store, use the same SKUs for the items in your virtual store.

Do You Need Batteries With That? One of the jobs of your store is to help you sell and promote products. Pricing is competitive on the Web, so make sure your solution makes it easy to put products on sale, as well as to highlight sale items on your opening page. At times, you'll need a Temporarily Out of Stock banner to warn customers that they'll have to wait for an item.

And because your Web site is both your salesperson and store, cross-sells and upsells--techniques that use a customer's proven interest in one product as a basis to suggest another--are vital Web merchandising tools. When your customer buys a radio-controlled model car, for example, your site should automatically remind him to buy batteries.

Already Got a Site? If so, you can add shopping cart software to begin selling online. Shopping-cart-only products require more advanced computer skills than store builders, although two user-friendly examples are iCat's Commerce Cart (www.icat.com) and Evocative's ProCart Plus (www.procart.com). The latter, for instance, charges $149 per month, with a onetime setup fee of $995 for an unlimited number of items.

3: ORDER PROCESSING

The customer clicks on the Buy Now button and begins the ordering process.

The Shopping Cart To the customer, the shopping cart looks like just another Web page, but's the essence of online commerce. In order to conduct the transaction, your customer selects an item and identifies necessary attributes such as quantity, size, or color. The shopping cart software retains this order information while the customer continues shopping and, you hope, placing additional orders.

When he's done, the shopping cart guides the buyer through the process of filling out his name, address, and payment information, then passes the data to you, so you can ship the merchandise and collect payment. This information is kept on a secure server (a specially encrypted computer accessed by a password) to ensure privacy and connects to a network of online payment services necessary to collect money.

Orders Coming in you may want your shopping cart to send you e-mail each time an order comes in, or check your accumulated orders in a batch at the end of each day. Some systems can fax you an announcement of an incoming order.

To receive such order info as a customer's address, credit card information, and items purchased, you must type in your password and log onto your CSP's secure server. This protects both you and the customer, because e-mail is not secure enough for financial transactions.

Taxes and Shipping Built into the shopping cart is the ability to calculate taxes and shipping costs. The best shopping cart software offers a variety of ways to calculate shipping, such as by weight, number of items ordered, or destination. Because Internet businesses have a national or global reach, you have to be prepared to charge the correct amount--many programs include sales tax tables to automatically charge taxes based on the customer's address.