There are dozens of questions that should be asked in developing the web site purchasing process if your web site doesn’t have e-commerce capabilities yet. Below are just a few.
Your Shopping Cart and Credit Card Payment Gateway Solutions:
- What Cards will your Credit Card Processor Company Accept?
- What Payment Gateway(s) Will Your Financial Institution Accept?
- What Administrative Tools Will Your Organization Need To Deal With Transactions?
- Will You Be Taking Credit Card Transactions Outside of Web-Based Processing?
- What are the Budget Limitations?
What do you want to the marketplace’s shopping experience to work?
- Payment Confirmation
- Transaction Entry Customer Error Reporting
- Tracking items such as fulfillment and shipping
- Purchase History Availability?
- Seamless Access to Online Products?
What about the Accounting Department?
- Will they need a variety of customizable sales/revenue reports?
- Will transactions need to be transmitted to accounting software?
- If so, manually or automated?
- What are the requirements of the accounting software?
If you are considering adding e-commerce to your web site capabilities, take this list of questions, expand on it and customize it for your organization, and find the answers. This should be the first thing your organization does relative to e-commerce.
THEN you should go find the software and service solutions based on those answers. And if you find it daunting… get assistance from a developer seasoned with site development that includes online commerce.