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A well-thought plan needs to be in place that should look at every aspect of the proposed online business critically. A competitive analysis will help you equip with the information required to promote and differentiate your online business. Explore your competitor’s product selection, pricing structure and promotional offers and then target your audience.
Spend time understanding the laws and regulations of your country/state governing online commerce. Many governments give taxbreaks or have a different tax structure for online commerce. If you are going to sell across state and country boundaries, you need to carefully study the tax implications.
Next, you need to decide on whether to build-or-buy software to power your store. Are your requirements met bya canned software package? Should you build from scratch for maximum control? Customize freely available open-source software? Or rent software as a service? The selection of eCommerce package depends on your requirements and budget.
You need to decide on how you are going to accept payments. There are a number of options available: credit and debit cards, direct debit, e-check, PayPal, wire transfer, etc. Each of those payment methods have associated transaction and other fees. What works best for one merchant may not work for the other.
If you are selling physical goods, plan the location of your warehouse(s) carefully. Decide if drop-shipping would work for your business. And think of the shipment options that you are going to offer to your customer.
Plan on keeping the customer engaged throughout the buying process. Alert the customer when the product ships. Plan on providing customer support through various channels - forums, email, chat etc. Draft a return-policy and plan on how you are going to handle returns.
The graphic design and content on your eCommerce site should appeal to the customer. The website should be designed for easy navigation. Include photographs of the products you are going to sell. Online customers expect to see what a product looks like through pictures at different angles. Thus, you will have to budget for engaging a good graphic designer, copywriter and a user experience consultant.
You will have to plan on marketing your online store. How do you bring in more visitors, make them buy your product or service, and keep them coming again for more? Search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), link-building, social outreach and e-mail marketing are popular choices for driving traffic to your site.
When you start selling online, all of a sudden you are capturing people's sensitive credit card data. This data needs to be protected from unauthorized access. The credit card industry has come up with a set of guidelines on how best to handle and protect customer data. For instance, the credit card details from the customer's browser to your server must be encrypted. This requires the use of a secure protocol (HTTPS) between the customer's computer and your server. For this to happen, you need to invest in a digital certificate. You will also need to encrypt the credit card details if you plan to store that on your server.
Just like a brick-and-mortar store needs a name and location, your online business store needs to register and claim a domain name. You can register a domain name for an annual fee through a domain name registrar. Your online store will need to be hosted on a server; you need to identify a reliable hosting service provider for this.
In the next section, you will understand the various Components of an eCommerce Store.