Which e-Commerce solution should we choose?

Whether you are starting a new social enterprise or reevaluating your current business platform, one of the most important decisions you will make concerns your choice of an e-commerce solution.

Fully hosted, or web service based, providers are seemingly everywhere and may offer you additional start up support by providing assistance with domain name registration, website design, as well as set up of a merchant account, payment gateway and credit card processing. This is over and above their web hosting and shopping cart solutions and can be a great starting place for first-time store owners.

Other standard features should include SEO optimization (friendly URLs that don’t mask your product pages from search engines), simplified checkout (to help avoid abandoned carts), fraud protection and help support.

On top ten reviews, my starting place for most software evaluation, their team has reviewed 15 different e-commerce providers. The reason I consider this a starting place is that while some features are fairly standard across the top solutions, the ones that aren’t may have important implications for the type of store you are running. Examples of these differentiating factors include:

• How sensitive are you to bandwidth charges? Volusion is less expensive in their basic monthly fee, however, a google search reveals many user complaints about excessive bandwidth charges. If you anticipate heavy traffic to your site, or you require content rich descriptions in your product pages, this may quickly become an issue for you.
• How important is custom design to you? If differentiation for your site is tied to its look and feel, or you have established a brand with your existing design, you may want to carefully consider the design templates offered. While coreCommerce offers fewer standard design templates, they also offer the option to alter the CSS for their templates, providing you with more control over them. coreCommerce also allows you to integrate their shopping cart by connecting it to your existing website.
• How many products and product attributes do you require? Some providers have limits on the number of products and when you read the fine print, they may also count each variant of a product against these limits.
• How much content management do you need? Many providers have some level of content management built-in, however, they may also restrict how many content pages you can publish or whether you can nest them at different levels. More fully featured, built-in, Content Management Systems can offer Blogs, Chat, statistics, newsletters, auto-responder e-mails, multi-language support, WYSIWYG editors, FAQ sections and product support forums. Identifying which are important to you may weed out some solutions.
• What marketing options do you require? If Gift Cards or Certificates are a critical marketing tool for you, or gift wrapping a critical service, make sure your provider has this built-in. Other discount options, preferred member pricing, and shipping promotions may also be important to your business.
• Do you have wholesale or Business 2 Business clients? B2B support could include a private area where you can sell goods at wholesale prices, or even have different prices or product options for different vendors. Often this may not be in the basic package, but included at a premium package that you can upgrade to.
• How easy is the solution to maintain? Most providers have simplified templates to update product information, however, if your products change frequently, you may also require bulk update capability for product information or product images.
• Does the solution have integrated inventory management and if so, to what level? In my mind, nothing is more frustrating for a customer than to finally select a product, only to have it unavailable at checkout or worse, have a message sent after purchase that the order cannot be completed.
• Can it be integrated with your peripheral software? Most options allow integration with packages such as Quickbooks or Stone Edge Order Management, ultimately saving you time and allowing you to run your business more effectively.

The good news is that if you dig a bit deeper past the reviews and go directly to the vendor sites, you can often obtain more detail about these features, and most even offer demos or one month free to evaluate their functionality.

If these providers can’t meet your needs, you may want to consider a more customized option. Magento is a fully featured, open source platform (Drupal) that is extremely powerful and can grow with your business. The issue with it for new store owners or small businesses, may be that in order to use more advanced features, such as gift certificates and Business 2 Business functionality, you must purchase the enterprise version at $8,900 (US) per year. Additionally, you will require set up assistance and there will be ongoing support costs and dependancies on outside providers associated with this. There are some great examples of Magento sites, including the ones showcased on their site.

In short, spending the time (20 to 40 hours depending on the complexity of your store) to evaluate your needs in detail against features offered by providers could help you avoid frustration, or worse, abandoned carts and lost sales opportunities.