Frequently asked Questions E-commerce (828) 713-0535 helpdesk@leelehman.com PO Box 19185, Asheville NC 28815 Q:  What do I need to know about web commerce? Q:  What do I need to know about taking payments online? Q:  How do I pick a shopping cart? Q:  Ok. I've decided I really want to do my own shopping cart. What's involved? Q:  How do I get and process web orders? Q:  What if I don’t want to get involved in order fulfillment at all, but I want somebody else to take the orders and fulfill them. Can I do that? Q:  You said I can arrange for a site to automatically download my product? How easy is that to set up? Q:  What do I need to know about marketing my web site? Q: What I’m selling isn’t widgets, but services. I need my customers to be able to send me the results of a questionnaire. How do I do that? Q:  What do I need to know about web commerce? A:  Web commerce includes several steps:    1. Creating traffic which comes to your site (web optimizing, pay-per-click, etc,)    2. Converting traffic into sales, which means not only informative copy, but copy that makes people want to buy    3. Processing the payment (easier), or getting the person to phone in or e-mail an order (harder) Most of this FAQ explains point 3, but really - if your site cannot do points 1 and 2 well, then you are wasting your money trying to create 3. Unless you have a personal or product name that shouts to the skies, chances are, you can use some help turning your site into a selling site. Go to Top Q:  What do I need to know about taking payments online? A:  Practically nothing, if you just want to take Paypal or Google Checkout. Otherwise, there are several decisions to be made. The biggest decision is whether you want to have automatic clearing, or you want to manually clear orders. Automatic clearing means that the shopping cart is designed to process the credit card, whereas manual methods rely on you inputing the credit card charge yourself. This might as first seem like a no-brainer, but guess again. If you will be selling a lot of one-of-a- kind items, customized items, or services, you may not want automatic clearing. If the order is complex, you don't want to have to process refunds. At this time, there are marginally lower costs for manual processing. But high volume might make the difference in charges moot. Go to Top Q:  How do I pick a shopping cart? A:  The first question is whether you need a shopping cart at all. For many US vendors, Paypal and/or Google Checkout is really all you need – and both come with no fees and maintenance other than getting the payment buttons installed on your web page – and the percentage that both charge on sales (Google also has a small transaction fee). If you only have a few items and occasional sales, this is probably enough. For the next step up, you have a couple of choices. There are services that act as your shopping cart: they handle all the work, and charge you accordingly. Your web host may advertise shopping cart software. Here, it’s important to notice whether they are offering for free, i.e., as part of your web hosting, or as a rental fee. There is rarely a good reason to rent the shopping cart software itself: if that’s your only option, then you may need to shop for a new hosting site. There are other possible charges associated with your shopping cart, such as those associated with an SSL certificate (the system for keeping credit card transactions confidential). Again, you need to shop to see if these rates are competitive. There are many different shopping carts out there. If your web hosting is Unix-based, then changes are, you have the choice of Agora, CubeCart, OS Commerce and Zen Cart already built in as part of your package. These or similar packages are likely to meet at least 95% of your needs. There are a few things which could require a more esoteric package, such as multiple vendors. But apart from that, one of the best ways to get to know the options is to visit the home site of each of the carts your host offers. Chances are, they have a set of sample sites listed. See if you can find one that looks like yours, and you can then be confident that the package in question will work for you. Lehman Associates can help you review shopping cart options and help you make the best decision for your needs. Go to Top Q:  Ok. I've decided I really want to do my own shopping cart. What's involved? A:  The steps in setting up E-commerce (apart from Paypal and Google Checkout) include the following:    1. Decide on which shopping cart you want to use – and whether your domain host supports it.    2. Decide whether you want to process cards automatically, or offline. Make whatever arrangements are necessary in terms of software or merchant account to insure that your choice is possible.    3.   Install the shopping cart software    4.   Arrange for your SSL certificate    5.   Arrange with the Post Office, UPS, FedEx or whomever for shipping options, if you have product that ships.    6.   Either take pictures or get pictures of your products. A shopping cart without pictures is not nearly as attractive.    7.   Set up your company settings, and modify the appearance of the shopping cart to suit your preferences.    8.   Load your products.    9.   Test your system! Sound a little complicated? It is. There are alternatives, however. Lehman Associates can help you determine the best alternatives for your business. Go to Top Q:  How do I get and process web orders? A:  It depends, because you have two options. Whether it’s Paypal, Google Checkout, or another shopping cart, you will get an e-mail telling you that an order has been received. The usual answer at that point is that you will log in to your shopping cart or Paypal account, get the address of the customer, and send out the order. If you are doing manual processing of credit cards through a shopping cart, then you would run the credit card before shipping the order. However, there are also websites where you can set up an account and have them set up for automatic download of your product, if it’s an mp3, document, or other downloadable file. These sites are often free if you are doing less than $50-100 of business per month, with a charge for larger amounts of commerce. Go to Top Q:  What if I don’t want to get involved in order fulfillment at all, but I want somebody else to take the orders and fulfill them. Can I do that? A:  Yes, but you’ll pay more for the service. You may well know that Apple set up the model site for this for downloading music. But other sites, like cdbaby.com sell cd’s and downloads. While they will fulfill your orders, you will still have to keep them stocked with the physical cd’s. Amazon fulfillment does much the same for book orders - but you pay for the service, and you have to get them the books. The one exception for paying substantially more is if you are selling downloadable product. There are sites devoted to doing this which can be quite reasonable. Go to Top Q:  You said I can arrange for a site to automatically download my product? How easy is that to set up? A:  If you use Paypal or Google Checkout, it’s pretty easy, because there are a number of sites designed as front-ends to your existing account. You use their site to create a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button, and then that site passes your order to your account, and, when it receives confirmation back that the transaction has gone through, then either the customer is taken directly to a download link, or a link is e-mailed to the customer along with the order confirmation. Go to Top Q:  What do I need to know about marketing my web site? A:  You can have the best web site in the world, but if nobody can find it, what good is it doing you? There are several ways that you can market your site: 1. The name itself is a marketing tool, because the name is a primary means of optimizing your site. Click here for a discussion of issues involved with the actual name of your website.  2. You can use conventional marketing, whether through putting it in your business cards, distributing postcards, direct mail, or print advertising. 3. You can add a “tag line” with your domain name onto your e-mail account(s), so every e-mail that you send out advertises your site. 4. You can find free or paid listings or advertisements for your site But the other point, which may be even more important, is that, once you’ve gotten them to your site, you need to keep them there! It’s your content, or your advertising message, that will “convert” them from a prospect to a customer. Go to Top Q:  What I’m “selling” isn’t widgets, but services. I need my customers to be able to send me the answers to a questionnaire. How do I do that? A:  In current web parlance, what you are talking about is a “form”  or “survey.” This used to be a big problem in html, and it actually was part of the reason that websites written in php became so popular. Look at the contact page in many websites, and you’ll see the name is something like “contact.php” instead of “contact.htm.” Actually, these days, forms and surveys are much easier to integrate into a conventional web page. The difference is more functional: what do you want to do with the data? In a survey, you are mainly interested in the aggregate: how many people picked Monday night vs. Thursday night. In a form, you are interested in the individual specifics: Mary wants a two hour session of a particular type, or a particular day. In either case, there are web sites that can create not only the html code needed to have the function on your site, but, in the case of surveys, do the graphical and statistical analysis you may want. In other words, both of these functions are very easy add-ons to a site design. Go to Top All the images here are clickable links to websites that Lee has either designed, or administered.