Although we are located in Saint George Utah, daily we get calls about e-commerce from all over the country, Salt Lake City, New York,  Las Vegas, California to name a few.  When these calls come in, usually the client has a lot of ecommerce questions about what they need to do in order to sell things online.  As an internet consulting company, we like to provide the best advice and recommendations we possibly can.  The success of our customers is paramount.

Typically when a customer calls us about a new or existing e-commerce project, we have more questions for them than they have for us.  In this post I am going to try and go over some of these questions because they are things that anyone should think about when doing an e-commerce project.  It doesn’t matter what you are selling online, to be successful selling it you need to choose the right software to sell it.  There is no one size fits all solution, and careful thought should be put in to make sure you choose a solution that works for you long term, and helps your company be successful.

Often the customers calling us have a pre-determined notion of what they want because of some article they read or because of something a friend recommended.  We still want to verify that the platform they want to use is the right one for them.  Common platforms include Magento E-commerce, Joomla Virtue Mart, Spree – based on Ruby on Rails, SilverStripe, OS Commerce.  But there are many!

Still the following are things we want to understand:

How many products do you intend to sell online?

If a company or individual has only a few products to sell, we might recommend a totally different solution than we would if they had a few hundred, thousand or even a few hundred thousand items.  If there are only a few items for sale, we might also ask are they being sold one at a time? or would someone purchase several at one time.  If they are only likely to buy one type of item at a time, and if there are only a few items, a simple buy now button might suffice.

However if there are many items, and the user might purchase any number of different items then a shopping cart will be necessary.  Even then the cart we recommend will depend on the number of products, what kind of products those are and how those products will go into the online store once it is developed.

Naturally if there are only a few or even a few dozen they can be manually entered with great care to make sure everything is perfect for each item.  If there are a few thousand however, it is a completely different scenario.

Are the products simple or are they configurable?

If there are a lot of products the next thing we might want to know is what the products look like from a data point of view.  Are they simple products like a white undershirt that comes in three sizes?  Or are they configurable products like a shirt that comes in three sizes, 9 colors and a choice of 5 different images on the shirt?

These two scenarios might look completely different in the store, and certainly will be completely different when loading the data in.

Which brings us to the next point

How will the products be entered into the store?

Some distributors and manufacturers do an excellent job of providing product catalogs in a CSV format with excellent descriptions, titles, images and everything you need to put them into your online store.  Interestingly however most of them don’t.  It is like they deliberately don’t want you to be able to define their product to your customers.

If the number of items is small manually entering them is a great option, but again for a large number of items this can be a huge job.  And it is important if your dealing with iBCScorp or some other E-commerce or web design company, that you consider before you start the project how you will get the data into your new online store.

We have had to do all kinds of things in the past, from manually entering product data from paper catalogs, to writing code to screen scrape the market in order to capture product data to populate stores.  The simplest way however is typically a simple CSV import provided you can get good clean data.

Once the data is loaded into the system, you can optimize each page with the help of our SEO experts to help make that data distinct and better than any competitors who may have used the same CSV import.  It is important that any website be easy to maintain – not just the product data, but other product related data as well using a Content Management System.

Is a Content Management System CMS required?

I think mostly yes it is required.  Sometimes it is not, like if you already have one, or if somehow you have a fixed list of clientele who you sell to and you don’t necessarily need to market on the internet, otherwise I would say definitely so.

In some cases a customer may have an extensive wordpress or Joomla Blog already in place with tons of traffic.  Lets not ruin a good thing we can figure out a way to add a store to or along side an existing community or traffic source, this is fine and a CMS may not be required accept for being able to manage product content.

Also there are rare cases where customers have come to us with a set list of clients they sell to – say distributors, and they don’t even want their products necessarily to be available for non distributors – so they don’t care about SEO, they don’t care about press releases and they don’t need to drive traffic to their site.  If this isn’t you then you need a CMS.

Many customers over look the importance of a content management system (CMS) with their online store.  Truth is building a better mousetrap doesn’t really work.  There have been many many ideas which have failed because it doesn’t matter how great your product or idea is if people don’t know about it.  This is where a CMS is important.  The content in a CMS helps drive traffic, and helps to educate your potential clients about your company and products.

No a just putting up some static html pages doesn’t cut it.  The content needs to be dynamic and living.  Posting new information about new products, new research, new uses etc. for your products, otherwise, it is a declining market for you, even if your selling a commodity item, the information about that item is an important part of making a purchasing decision online.

Another important question we ask is how will the product be paid for?

How will you take payment on your online store?

This may seem like an obvious one, but it isn’t.  There are all kinds of issues to think about.  If your low volume PayPal may be fine.  If your higher volume however you definitely will need a merchant account and a payment gateway.

A merchant account is the same thing that all retailers use to process credit cards.  In a brick and mortar store, they use a machine to swipe your card.   This is accepted a secure way to take payment.  When taking payments over the internet, we have the same security concerns.  These concerns are handled by what is called a payment gateway.  This payment gateway replaces the swipe machine at the grocery store, and they process all of the transactions through to the merchant account.  The merchant account then processes them through to your bank.

Still there are other things to consider – such as are there recurring payments, partial payments or other special arrangements.  These are definitely issues which should be understood before any e-commerce project is started.  Another is how will you deliver product once it is paid for?

How will you deliver what you have sold?

Will this be a web based delivery, will you be shipping products?  How will you ship them USPS, UPS, Common Carrier, International?  In some cases we have had clients do custom shipping quotes because they have to schedule freight.  In most cases however simple USPS and UPS integration suffice.  There is obviously a whole lot of issues behind this one as well such as drop shipping, order processing, warehouse management etc.  These issues usually step beyond an e-commerce platform, but they are a huge piece of e-commerce.  Typically the fulfillment, accounting, purchasing etc. are handled in another system like an ERP system – we do this but I won’t cover that here.

What e-commerce sites do you like and what do you like about them?

Yep, don’t hesitate to look around at what other people are doing right and wrong.  If you find a good concept, it is often easier to show us a site that you like and say we want a widget on there similar to this.  Also for design this can help us get an idea of what you are looking for.

What is your budget?

Yea I know we ask this question and we hear all the time, I don’t want to tell you what my budget is I want you to tell me what it is going to take.

Our objective however is to deliver you the best product we can within a budget that is affordable and fits with your plans.  Sometimes this can’t be done, but usually it can.  We will work hard to balance out feature requirements with an affordable budget to give you the best we can.  We want you to be a successful business and for us to be a partner with you supporting you long term and helping your business grow.

If you want to talk about your e-commerce ideas please don’t hesitate to give us a call.  435-215-4674.

Every day customers ask us to add a facebook, twitter, or similar account to their home page.  Every day we hear from people about how they will use social networking to market their business, product, or idea.  However they usually are talking about publishing, not about collaboration.  Often the collaborative side of Social Networking is overlooked.  Social Networking is not only about using social networks to promote your product, business or idea by pushing out more marketing content, it is also about collaboration.

Publishing aspect of Social Networking

Using social networks is a great way to post marketing content.  Everyone knows the importance of getting published, and people have been publishing content for a long time.  The Internet made it even easier to publish content.  And social networks made it even easier still.  It is very simple for someone to create an account and start loading in content, pictures and more.

Putting content about your business then in the right locations will allow potential customers to learn about your business product or idea.  Obviously it is important to put out good, interesting, and helpful information.

However many business overlook social networks as a place to gather customer feedback and involve customers in a collaborative process benefiting the company and the customer over the long run.

Collaborative Social Networking

Publishing something on Facebook, or twitter doesn’t mean that a company is successfully involved in social networking.  Successful social networking business however collaborate with their clients.

Collaborative social networking not only gets people talking about a business or idea, but it also allows companies to gain valuable information about their customers.  Evangelists who are happy with your product or service can promote it by giving positive feedback (and doing some of the publishing for you.).  Remember posting negative feedback can be done as well.  This can be a positive thing if  adjustments can be made, improving products or services.

Potential customers who have been made aware of your product or service through a social network – from valid known trusted sources, will be more likely to do business with you, and are one step closer to a purchase.

Through Collaborative Social Networking we can communicate better with customers

The most effective social networking allows customer feedback.  Customers have the ability to:

• provide ideas for service or innovation
• provide early warnings of problems or opportunities
• provide testimonials
• provide ideas for improvement
• provide customer service tips from user to user

Through social networking companies can better their product and services.  From social networking businesses can also be more available to clientele or consumers allowing better more effective communication with them, producing a better result for the customer.

Social Networking is not just about publishing, but about collaborating with others about a product or service.  Instead of thinking of social networks as a place to post marketing content, maybe businesses should think of social networks as places to gather customer feedback and involve customers in a collaborative process to improve the overall customer experience.

Companies Successful With A Collaborative Approach

Some examples of a collaborative approach in use are the Kellogg’s sweepstakes, Coca-Cola’s Mountain Dew Dewmocracy, and the Starbucks’s My Starbucks Idea campaign. These three examples each get customers online and communicating with the companies.

Kellogg’s is always trying to involve customers through special promotions and sweepstakes, this is a very minor form of a collaborative approach, but it still gets some people excited to see if they’ve won.

Dewmocracy 2008 encouraged mountain dew consumers to vote for the next flavor of mountain dew, then buy it when it came out. The new mountain dew in 2008 was voltage, and they are having a Dewmocracy 2 this year. Apparently it worked the first time.

MyStarbucksIdea.com started in 2008 as a forum for consumers to make suggestions and ask questions. The website now has 180,000 registered users, and 80,000 submitted ideas, 50 which are now sold at Starbucks. Starbucks has benefited from its social-media promotion.

IBCScorps Social Networking Initiative

IBCSCorp – Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation works hard to help its clients improve their use of web based technologies.  As Internet consultants, we do a variety of programming, consulting, SEO and marketing work for our clients.  Including Social Network Marketing.

As a company most of the interaction with our clients is via telephone, our website and via e-mail.  We don’t deal with end users and relative to Starbucks and Kellogg’s our customer base is small.

We do use social networking to publish articles such as this.  We also publish press releases and pertinent industry information.  We are hoping over the next several months to establish more collaborative social networking methods allowing customers to provide feedback, and collaborate with each other on ways to improve their business.

Crimson AV provides a wide variety of Audio and visual mounting solutions.  Their primary client base is professional audio visual equipment dealers and audio visual installers.

Because Crimson AV has over 15 years of experience in the design, manufacture and sales of professional mounting equipment, they can help people who maybe have never purchased mounting equipment select the right product, makes sure it is compatible and give information about installation.  They also can provide support to audio visual installers and resellers.

Their products include projector mounts, fat panel mounts, monitor mounts, audio visual carts and stands, speaker mounts, Flat panel wall mounts, in wall boxes and a large array of Audio Visual accessories.

Crimson AV has contracted with IBCScorp to help improve their current website as well as to help build their brand name recognition through PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Over the next several weeks SEO Experts and Ruby on Rails based Spree shoping cart experts will be working on various improvements in the shopping cart process, making the site more friendly to its customers.  Internet Business Consulting Services will also help with search engine friendly URLS and other web optimization and SEO work.

Missionary Business Cards feature the work of many famous artists including Chad Hawkins, Harry Anderson, Ted Henninger, Robert T. Barret, John Scott, Tom Lovell, and more.

Missionaries purchase business cards because they want to re-locate people who they have become friends with and served with and be able to reach them. As anyone knows, the purpose of a Missionary’s Work is sharing the things that bring the most joy in their lives with other people. The result of that often is long lasting, loving relationships. If you want to learn more about Latter Day Saint Missionaries, or about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you can do that here mormon.org.  You could probably even have some Mormon Missionaries to come to your door, to share the message of Jesus Christ at no charge.

There are over 50,000 full time missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons) serving people around the world. There are missionaries from many different denominations also serving missions to help other people.

Because of this there is a large need for MissionCards.com to allow quick and easy printing of Business Cards for Missionaries.

Missionarycards.com is putting forth this effort to redo their website and improve the business card ordering process on their website because as time passes sites seem to loose their impact as new better web based software and techniques become available.

In order to make these changes happen, Missionary Cards has contracted with Saint George Utah Based Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation (ibcscorp.com).

Internet Business Consulting Services looks forward to working with MissionCards.com to help improve their product offering, and to help them market their product with web marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Techniques.  The current site is done in PHP, and will likely stay PHP, or be migrated to Cake PHP, or to a CMS Content Management application in the future for easier maintenance and development.

Look for new products and an easier to use interface coming soon at Missioncards.com

Tonerman

There are many companies that provide cheap products, but after more than 20 years of experience in toner re-manufacturing, their product is high-quality and comes with a satisfaction guarantee.

In order to improve their market penetration in Salt Lake City, Utah areas, and their ability to serve their clients who need printer support services, Toner Man is implementing an ERP system.

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning.  Many small to medium sized businesses don’t know what ERP is.  Typically a small business manages their business using Quickbooks, paper and a variety of other integrated or un-integrated disparate systems.

Some Examples:

E-commerce example:

If a company had e-commerce and had online orders they might  download orders from the internet and import them into Quickbooks manually.  This is quite common, they might import the orders themselves, or just a monthly or weekly summary of orders so they can account for their online sales.  Information about their customers would then exist partly in Quickbooks and partly in their e-commerce system.

CRM – Sales Management Example:

If a company had sales staff they might manage their sales using paper, an in house CRM ( Customer Relationship Management System) like Act, or a hosted CRM solution like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and vtigercrm. The problem they encounter in any of these scenarios eventually is an integration problem. They have to import their customers into their accounting software if it is Peachtree or Quickbooks or whatever any time they get an order they have to copy the clients data into the accounting software.  Further, any time the sales person needs information about a customer – did they pay are things past due is there a hold on the account, did an address or phone number change, have we done business with this account etc. they have to ask the accountant.  Not having this information like an address change may be expensive for the guy who just made a call on that business.

At the end of a year they may have different data for many accounts in each system.  Eventually if the company grows, the manual process breaks down and they have to figure out some way to integrate the systems.

OpenERP is an integrated Solution

By choosing OpenERP to for CRM – Customer Relationship Management, Tonerman is able to be way ahead of the game.  As their company grows and they migrate more of their business process to OpenERP their cost of doing business will decrease or stay the same rather than increasing because their processes will be more automated, they will be using less paper, and repeat entries will be eliminated.  Currently they are doing only CRM, but in the future they may also use the MRP – Manufacture Resource Planning to manage toner manufacturing module, HR-Human Resources Module to manage attendance, accounting to manage the books etc.  There is also e-commerce integration capability with Magento E-commerce.  If they use this with the accounting module for example they wouldn’t have multiple copies of product data – only one.

OpenERP CRM is being implemented with iBCScorp

Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation-iBCScorp.com headquartered in Saint George Utah is an OpenERP implementation and integration company.  They will be providing OpenERP Installation and maintenance.  They will also be training sales staff on OpenERP CRM, and completing the OpenERP Implementation using OpenERP 6.0.

Sales force productivity management

Tonerman looks forward to using OpenERP’s CRM capabilities to manage its sales force and continue to grow its client base, serving its clients across the Wasatch Front and nationwide.

Eco Smart Pest Control also can help with Rodent Problems.  If you have any kind of Bug, Bee, or Rodent infestation of any kind in the Austin, Texas area call them.

Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation is working with Eco Smart Pest Control to help them improve market penetration in the Austin, Texas Market. There are several pest control companies in the Austin Market, and even Austin Pest Control lists. Looking on Google, it is obviously a competitive market.  However it doesn’t appear that the other companies have the patented technology to keep pets and humans safe when exterminating pests.  So we are working hard with Eco Smart to increase market awareness of their product through Search Engine Optimization to make it easier for customers looking for a safe alternative to find them. One of these activities is Link Building. So if your in the Austin area and in favor of safe pest control give them a link and a positive review, or a call to try out their services.

A few weeks ago my daughter had her 8 year-old birthday party.  Imagine my surprise showing up late for the party and finding my house full of girls.  Fortunately I have a lot of girls of my own 7 of them 4 older and 3 younger with 1 son bringing up the rear.  The 4 older girls had volunteered their afternoon to put on a salon party for my 8 year old daughter and all of her friends.  They had set up salon stations all over the house doing pedicures, hair, crafts and manicures.  It was something else I tell ya.  Nothing could have been more fun.

For those people who don’t have four older children to do the dressing up and, well for those who don’t really want to turn their home into a mad house anyway, you can still have a party like this at a Shear Madness Franchise location near you.

Shear Madness Franchising of Overland Park, Kansas is a creative and fun company providing Salon Services, “Youniquey Boutiquey”, and parties for youth ages 3 to 13.  What a unique way to have fun with your children or grandchildren.

For Franchisee’s, Shear Madness Franchising provides a wealth of training, ongoing support and other services to help those franchisee’s be successful.  Just this week they made an agreement with Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation to develop an intranet for their franchisees.  This tool will help the Franchisees keep their Shear Madness location stocked with fun items for the children visiting them.  It also provides internal communication for the franchisee’s.

Originally this project was going to be done using Joomla or Magento, but after closer evaluation of the project, it shall be done using A custom Cake PHP Code. Cake PHP will allow the site to be customized to meet the intranet and various user group requirements to manage users at the franchiser location as well as the various user types at the franchise location.  Some of the features in the custom Cake PHP project include a rolling blog, shopping cart to see and order vendor products from over 30 vendors, notes and eventually a document management system for training franchisee staff.

We look forward to watching Shear Madness Franchises grow, and for a franchise near us.

In addition to viewing and doing reviews of Boat Cleaning, Canvas, Diesel Engine Services, Boat Electronics,  Marinas, Sailboat Services and other boating related services, they are also working with iBCScorp to help improve their online traffic.  This shows a commitment on the part of Boater Rated to make their site a valuable service to their customers, and even the establishments rated on the web site.

IBCScorp will be helping with various Web Marketing Activities, doing a combination of on site SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and off site SEO activities.  These SEO activities include: Link Building, Page Optimization, URL optimization, Meta Data and other site optimizations. If you haven’t done so already, especially if you’re located in the Florida Area check out BoaterRated.com. Certainly if you have a boating related service: Marina, Instruction, Boater Repairs, boat sales or service business make sure your company is listed so that your customers can give you valuable feedback on your business.

Internet Business Consulting Services, iBCSCorp, provides web application development, websites, web marketing and other services to people who use the web to conduct their business.  It is a pleasure for Internet Business Consulting Services to have participated in helping present the Boater Rated Experience.  Boater Rated is a customized meeplace application.

Boaters before doing any boating, or before having repairs done or anything can go to Boater Rated and read reviews about who the best providers are, and where the best places are to go.  It is nice knowing that your going to a place that others have given a good rating and had a good experience at, or even which places to avoid.  Boater Rated makes it that much easier to have good boating experiences.

“Where could we go online to find objective information about outboard mechanics and other providers of boating services? …The main objective is to put information in the hands of fellow boaters that will help them enjoy more great days on the water…” -BoaterRated.com

More great days on the water doesn’t that just give you the chills!  If you haven’t had a chance yet, go to boaterrated.com and check out some recent events, or list your favorite places.