Before opening an online store, there are various aspects one must establish prior. A lot of the time people forget to gather all necessary plans before moving forward. Here is a list of four things you should already have figured out before you start selling online.

Products

Pretty obvious, but some people decide to open an e-commerce solution before even deciding on what it is they’re going to sell. Take it a step further, are you going to sell clothing? Furniture? iPods? Sony Products? If so, you need to establish how you want to present the products? Do the products require options (sizes, finishes, colors, patterns, etc)? Does the price change per option? Are they customizable? Do you have the rights to display images of the products (in the case of Sony, if you are not a partnered seller and post images of their items online you will get a cease & desist letter)? Its always best to have as much of this already established before even considering opening an online store.

Collecting Payment

Something many people also do not realize is that they need to have a way to collect payment. There are numerous routes one can go with online. PayPal is fairly popular and can also process credit card transactions (under the Payment Pro or Standard), 2checkout, or a real processor. All come with their own fees so as a seller looking to open up an E-Commerce store, how to collect payment needs to be established. Before you can start looking for someone to develop your store, this is something that needs to be decided before developing scope.

Plans for Shipping

By selling online, anyone can order from you. With that, they can be located anywhere from down the street, the next city over, or another country. You need to establish how you are going to get the items that they order to them. Will you use USPS? FedEx? UPS? Or a combination of both. Are you going to have discounted rates with the carriers? Will the discounted rates be reflected on the shipping fees you charge you customers? Or will you charge them full price and have added profit? Will you need live rates or fixed or tiered? These are only a few of the question someone wanting to open shop online would need to answer in regards to shipping.

Fulfilling the Order

As developers, we’ve also had people who do utilize extra systems to do their fulfillment or drop ship their products from vendors. When scoping your e-commerce solution, you want to make sure that you make these details clear. If you need specific information in a specific format in order to stream-line your fulfillment process, make sure to mention it.

The Shopping Cart Solution

What’s even more amazing is the fact that there are hundreds of e-commerce solutions on the internet today. Each shopping cart has several features, there will be one that can meet your needs. Its best to establish your business model and the various facets of running a store online before finding a solution.

Tags: e-commerce, fulfillment, gateway, merchant account, online shop, online store, opening up shop, sell online, shipping, store

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 7:26 pm and is filed under E-Commerce Guide | . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.