What's New in Small Store Web Sites

What's New in Small Store Web Sites
19 January 2002

E-commerce Packages and Portals

Let's start with a basic question. Is it necessary for you to sell online? I would say that the answer is, "No.% It's not necessary, but it's probably a good idea to be moving into this area.

It's not necessary, because for many of the products that you sell, your site needs to provide information for people to research purchases rather than to make the actual purchase. Musical instruments fall into the category of "major purchases" for most folks.

This puts musical instruments in a category with houses, automobiles, and financial products. Research tells us that consumers prefer to research major purchases online but then complete the purchase in a local retail location.

There are two good reasons to consider moving to e-commerce, though. First, as more of your competitors offer this option, you will be at a competitive disadvantage without it. That's a pretty good reason. But there's a better one.

Your best customers are going to seek out the convenience of online ordering, especially for repeat and replacement orders. The repeat and replacement part of musical instrument retail does not fall in the category of "major purchase."

When your customers want to purchase items like guitar strings, valve oil, and other, similar items, they will likely want the convenience of online ordering. The customers who are likely to want this the most are also the ones most likely to be your best customers, the ones who order the most and most frequently. Giving these folks online ordering options increases the quality of their customer experience while decreasing your cost of taking their small, frequent orders.

Okay, let's say you want to move into e-commerce. How do you get the job done? In today's marketplace, you've got two basic choices. You can pick up an e-commerce software package that you can use to design and build and e-commerce site or, you can go through an e-commerce portal, such as YAHOO Stores. Each option has pluses and minuses.

Let's look at the packages first. E-commerce packages have increased in sophistication and dropped dramatically in price in the last 2 years. In some cases, sophisticated features that used to take extensive programming are now available off the shelf. Web developers have become adept at assembling the pieces of e-commerce packages as the packages have become easier to use and as the developers have done more e-commerce sites.

That leads me to a key point on the use of the packages. Youāll probably want some professional help in building your catalog and getting it to work. My experience is that no matter how easy it looks in the beginning, getting an e-commerce package to work quickly and easily is beyond the reach of most store operators.

That doesn't mean that you can't learn to do it. What it does mean is that the learning curve is steep enough that you won't pick up enough in a weekend to do this profitably. Consider outside help for this aspect of your operation.

What are some of the things you should look for in your e-commerce package? Here are a few thoughts. Several of these items are features or capabilities that you may not want or need right away. Making sure that your package can grow to cover them is a way to assure that you won't have to change packages at great expense and effort down the road.

Whatever package you use should be easy to administer. You should be able to add products to your online catalog and remove them without outside help. You should be able to change prices and other characteristics whenever you choose.
Your package should allow you to set sale prices and to do special pricing for special groups, such as band directors.
Even if you do not plan on doing a lot of shipping initially, make sure that your package will handle separate shipping and billing addresses and will handle sales tax issues if you ship to areas with different tax rates.
Your package should enable you to do special things for your best customers. That's going to be one of your key success strategies. That means picking a package that gives you the ability to have special customers sign on and get special treatment, including special pricing, order history, and other features.
It's probably a good idea to get a package whose catalog can handle more than one illustration of an individual product. In many cases, youāll want to use a thumbnail picture of an instrument in the basic catalog, but allow visitors to see a larger more detailed picture if they choose.
Make sure your package is expandable and upgradeable so that you can do that if you choose.

The big advantage of a package is that you get maximum control and flexibility. On the other hand, the big advantage of a portal, such as YAHOO Stores, is that you can get up and running faster with less hassle on your part.

The choice is yours -- going for either package or portal. Choose the one that's best for your situation. You may find that it makes the most sense to begin with a portal strategy to ramp up quickly, while you develop a package that will give you more sophisticated options later.

Here are a couple of keys to success.

If you choose to sell things online, start with the products that are most likely to be purchased online profitably. Those are generally small replacement parts that are ordered over and over again. Tie this to a strategy of giving special care to your best customers. Make it easy for them to re-order.

The second strategy key is to tie your store and your Web site together as two channels of a single entity. Make sure that your strategy and your Web site give people the option to pick things up at the store. Drive people into the store for the things that are best done there, while allowing them to handle transactions on the Web when that's the way they choose to operate.

What to know more? Here are some resources.

About.com has an excellent review of the top five web store building packages. You'll find other helpful articles on picking e-commerce packages on that site as well.

Yahoo Stores is the premier e-commerce portal because of the traffic that Yahoo generates. It's also one of the most expensive.

There are several other sites which offer services to set up an online store for you. Here's a list of some, with links.