ECOMMERCE 101
Art Bobo, Moderator
- Able to be mostly unemployed because of his wife’s ecommerce site. She’s a jewelry designer. He did the current one in ZenCart, migrated from OS Commerce.
- wants to set up a Santa Cruz Ecommerce group to share resources, ideas and solutions around Ecommerce issues – dealing with shipping, SEO, product comparisons - if interested, contact: artbobo@hotmail.com
Designs websites for technology-challenged entrepreneurs. Mostly uses Paypal integration
Cruzio offers shopsite for many businesses. Mike Brogran from Cruzio is looking to offer some free ecommerce solutions to their customers.
How do people do the whole SSL thing? How do they manage secure certificates? PCI?
What kind of software is everyone using? What are the easiest to learn?
Shopsite is a monthly payment system. What are options that:
- Don’t cost so much? Or anything?
- Save customer accounts
- Allow admin to access all sales and customer data
Ecommerce integration, reconciling customer data on main site, and payment information on Ecommerce site.
Lots of product, lots of traffic, but not a lot of people buying. How do you get people all the way through the shopping cart process without having them abandon midway?
- Interface?
- How intuitive?
- Addressing customer fears – asking for more information than you really need? Making sure your cart is secure?
- Often sites don’t tell you how much something costs until you put it in the shopping cart. Not thinking about user experience.
Just because people abandon shopping carts, doesn’t mean you can’t still analyze the data about what products they were going to buy. Also, while a lot of people drop out, a lot of them come back and complete the transaction. You can track how far they get in the transaction process.
Are you required to create an account in order to purchase the item or service? That can cause people to balk.
Virtual Products?
Wanting to build a more sophisticated feedback loop for customers.
Recurring billing/subscription options? Paypal, Authorize.net
“Experience with check-outs generally not good. People want way too much information, but you can’t check out with less. So I walked away.”
“Some of the bigger companies, Google, Paypal, may be hard to work with if you have issues come up. Support and customer service not very good.”
Seems like there’s always 10x more work than you expect in setting up a shopping cart. What systems are easier to use, get up and running? What are more robust?
SHOPPING CARTS - all of these manage your products, connect with direct API to payment gateway(s). Some are more seamless, looks like it’s on your site, and some of them send you over to another site to process. Open Source
- Paypal (standard and pro APIs)
o At simple end (Paypal Standard), “Buy it now button” that you can cut and paste into your site. At advanced end (Paypal Pro), you can do a seamless integration into your site. Don’t need to set up an account to make a payment, but it’s not obvious. Paypal makes some customers uncomfortable.
- Google Checkout
o Similar to Paypal. You DO need to set up an account in order to make a payment.
- ZenCart
o Open Source - Offshoot of OS Commerce. Natively it requires customer to set up an account in order to make a purchase.
- Magento
o Open Source - New hot shopping cart, developed by Variand. Very pretty. By far the most feature –rich, but it’s “a beast.” An ordeal to install and build, and the overhead based on the code is HUGE, probably slows to a crawl.
- Virtue mart
o Open Source - Joomla CMS plug-in
- Ubercart
o Open Source – Drupal CMS plug-in
- WP-Ecommerce
o Open Source - Wordpress plug-in. Use lots of different themes. Can add items to your cart and it will show the status of your cart without reloading page. 1-page checkout option. Handles selling services online with ease. Uses multiple gateways. Just plug in a long string of numbers they give you.
- Shopsite
o Client has to re-enter their information every time. Pay monthly to use. Starts at around $16/month through Cruzio. Copy/past their Add to Cart code to your web page.
- Foxy Cart
o Hosted solution, costs money - $10-15/month. Very slick
- Volusion
o Hosted solution, costs money - $19/month for cheapest option. Very slick, they will also host your website, and integrate the cart.
- Shopify
o Hosted Solution
Hosted solutions cost money, but have a dedicated customer and technical support team to help you get up and rnning and troubleshoot. With Open Source, there is no upfront cost, but it can take time to imlement, and you have to be willing to get your hands dirty. Technical support may be weak or nonexistant.
If you’re already using a Content Management System (CMS), it’s probably a good idea to use a card that’s designed to integrate with that CMS.
Some of these shopping carts will let you look at abandoned transactions, client data.
From a user experience, the option of setting up an account should come at the end of the transaction, “Do you want to save your information for future purchases?”
PAYMENT GATEWAYS – reduce the risk of exposure. You don’t hold onto any of the customer bank data, the actual payment processes. They follow PCI so that you don’t have to.
- Authorize.net
- Google Checkout
- Paypal
PCI – Payment Card Industry association – not a legal entity. It’s VISA, Mastercard, Discover, AMEX working together and agreeing that they will shut out anyone who doesn’t agree to their guidelines and code of conduct. They have a stranglehold on credit card processing. A set of standards and guidelines for handling, sharing and storing customer data. Encryption, etc. Better to just avoid all of this.
What about using Amazon.com shops, eBay, Craigslist, etc.?
