“We’d like an eCommerce website”. That is a familiar sentence that most website developers have heard from time to time. But when you ask me that question what do you really want?

Developing a eCommerce website is pretty easy. eCommerce platforms, such as Zen Cart or OsCommerce, make the job little more than a load and configure operation. What’s more they are free.

But I’m afraid that’s not what you really want. What you really want is to be able to trade online and that’s not the same thing as setting up an eCommerce website. So how do you do this?

Yes, you will need an eCommerce site or, at minimum, a website that people can order products from. In most cases that’s the easy part. But products are not going to be handed to customers through the screen like the image above – if only they were! The difficult part is restructuring your business so that you can deal with all the things that have to occur offline.

These days, people expect items that they’ve ordered online to be shipped immediately. If you have to package and ship out more that a dozen or so orders a day, then you won’t be able to do that without serious planning and restructuring,

Here’s what you need to consider.

1. What volume or orders do you expect?
2. Will you need additional staff to handle this?
3. Where will you do the packing?
4. What shipper will you use?
5. How much stock will you be maintaining?
6. Where will you store the stock?
7. What kind of stock control will you use?
8. How will you handle queries and complaints?
9. How will you handle returns?
10. How will all this integrate with your existing offline business?

When you come to me asking for an eCommerce website, I will ask you whether you’ve considered these questions and have a plan in to deal with the answers.

It’s not in my interest, or yours to simply set up an eCommerce website and watch you fail.