Planning Your E-Commerce Imlementation

When you hire a service provider to design your e-commerce website, you need to be involved in the implementation strategy in order to ensure that the final product will be what you want and that your forthcoming costs and complexities are not inappropriately higher than they should be.

If you wait until the system has been completely implemented, it can be too late. The cost to reconfigure a system is prohibitive. As you add more products to your product line, it gets harder to change the design and internal setup. You are risking missed sales opportunities if it takes too long to update your product line or if your shopping cart is too complex for the end-user. The design has to consider not only ease of use, but also the 'back-end' setup since the ease of use is dependent on the internal setup.

You can reduce your costs and frustration if you raise certain issues with your designer before they start designing. For example,

Simplification: How many levels of products do you really need? How complex is the pricing structure? The more levels and/or options (attributes), the more clicks a user would have to do and the more confusion it may cause. You could lose your prospective buyer this way. Your maintenance costs are proportional to the complexities, i.e., the more complex, the higher the costs.
Design approach: Review the maintenance plans and strategy to ensure the best approach is taken for your business strategy.
Test run a few different products in different categories (adding, changing, attributes) to understand the maintenance impact of your implementation. It would be more cost-effective to overhaul at the beginning of implementation rather than later down the road. Don't just test one category of products.
Documentation: Make sure you receive the list of passwords, directory names, features, add-on products used for the implementation so that if you need to change service providers, you will have all the required information. You will save yourself big losses if you do this. Documentation should also be provided. To ensure this gets done most effectively, you should receive documentation updates throughout the project planning and implementation. Don't wait until the end to ask for this. Part of the documentation should include what you need to do on an ongoing basis. For example, how to upload, download, export, import, re-index, etc.
Naming conventions: What a difference the name makes! If your products were kitchen products such as:
home kitchen utensils 1 = one of your utensils
home kitchen appliances 1 = one of your appliances.
then naming your products 1HKU and 1HKA, respectively, would not be the best way to name them. You wouldn't easily be able to list all home kitchen products.
A better way might be HKU1 and HKA1; then searching for all home kitchen products with the code 'HK' would give you all utensils and appliances. Adding new products to your product list would take less time. Remember that a computer search works from left to right.