Building an E-Commerce Website? Crucial Questions You’ll Need to Answer

It never fails to surprise our clients when we let them know how easy can be to set up E-Commerce on their website. We aren’t exaggerating when we say that with a little elbow grease, a WordPress site can be selling products within a day or less. But to be fair, that can be an oversimplification.

Yes, an entry-level, very basic store can be set up and launched with amazing speed using WordPress, especially if you’re using a solid web development agency like us, and an industry leading E-Commerce system like WooCommerce or Shopify.

But the reality is more complex, and most stores – particularly B2B stores – do need to go beyond the basics. The timing & cost of adding E-Commerce to your site will depend largely on your answers to the more advanced questions. These include, in no particular order:

How would you like to handle shipping?

B2C sites often follow the recommended best-practices of either offering free shipping or flat shipping rates… or free shipping for orders of a desired size (encouraging shoppers to spend a little more in order for that free shipping to kick in). We find that B2B sites face more challenging decisions. There are various options to consider, including:

• Charge a flat shipping fee per order
• Charge a flat shipping fee per item
• Charge calculated shipping from your preferred provider (FedEx/UPS/USPS). These providers have API’s that can return shipping fees based on a product’s weight & dimensions.
• Custom situations (freight shipping, international shipping, sensitive/restricted materials, etc)

Disclose your shipping needs & preferences to your developer, and they’ll help to determine the best solution(s) to deliver. Pun intended? Oh yeah, definitely.

Will you be managing inventory?

When selling physical items, it’s important to ensure that customers don’t get frustrated by purchasing items that are out of stock without realizing. Simple inventory (stored in 1 location, only sold online) can be managed entirely within your E-Commerce software. However, if you have multiple locations and/or are also performing physical sales, you’ll likely need an integration with inventory management software, along with a strategy for handling your sales if a product is out of stock. Will you allow the sale but inform customers of a delay? Temporarily suspend its sales? Promote alternatives (if applicable)?

Will you need to track fulfillment?

Most sellers prioritize the ability to inform users of their shipment’s tracking information.

Would you like a robust customer account area?

Do you envision your customers having repeat business or enough sales volume that they’d benefit from an area on the site where they could track shipments, view past orders, submit re-orders, save favorites, or store payment methods? Let your developer know your goals and vision for the customer relationship you seek to build.

Will you be offering discounts?

Basic discount codes are very easy to set up, but do require additional functions to accept on the front-end, and manage on the back-end, and complexity levels of the codes can vary as well (such as codes that only apply to certain products, etc).

What 3rd parties do you need to integrate with (ERP, CRM, etc)?

Depending on the nature and size of your business, it may be essential to connect your web store to your company’s critical software infrastructure. Running Salesforce? Your store’s customer activity needs to be logged so your account managers & sales team can see the activity. Many B2B clients run sophisticated ERP solutions that include warehouse and inventory management, shipping, accounting, etc. – if so, your web store should be sending all its activity to that system as well. Inform your developer of your current systems and needs, and they’ll be able to do the necessary research to determine the best solution to connect the dots. The ease at which systems can be integrated varies widely. Plugins and add-ons have been created to make some connections quite easy — others need to use custom-developed API calls or even 3rd party (does that make them 4th party?) services like Zapier that specialize in building connection points between systems that are not inherently compatible.

How will you populate & maintain your product catalog?

Most store owners have, or can obtain, a simple spreadsheet of products and product data, which your developer will be able to import into the system using a bulk import tool by simply mapping fields. Complications can arise depending on the size of the catalog itself (WordPress may not be the best solution for enterprise-grade stores with thousands of complex products) or by how product data is managed. If product data is very fluid and needs to be maintained offline, this is another 3rd party integration that would be needed. If products are stable and changes can be made tactically in the WordPress editor, no additional functions would be needed.

Do you have existing users (potentially with existing order histories, payment methods etc.) that you need to onboard?

If you’re starting your store from scratch, you’ve got this one easy. But if you have an existing database of customers, you’ll need a strategy for onboarding those customers. Will past orders need to be available in their customer account area? Will they need to reset their passwords for the new system? Are you expecting their stored payment methods to still be available? Depending on your answers, the logistical challenges can be fairly straightforward, or quite complex. Walk-through your preferences, and your developer can help you consider the challenges, the potential impacts to cost & timelines, etc.

See? WordPress E-Commerce Development is easy!

… or not. It all depends on your needs, expectations, and budget. As we stated at the outset, a decent developer can get a very simple E-Commerce store can be up & running at lightspeed. But these more complicated situations are where the rubber meets the road. And it’s important to realize that the distinction for whether a developer is the right one for the job might not have the slightest thing to do with the quantity of e-commerce websites they’ve produced. The critical factor isn’t considering the volume of e-commerce a web firm has built, but instead, the complexity of complicated situations the firm has handled. If a firm has a history of handling complicated, custom website requirements, and delivering on those specifications – whether in the context of e-commerce or not – they’ll be the right fit for an e-commerce store that goes beyond the basics. And of course, we wouldn’t point that out if we didn’t speak from experience and confidence. Simply put, Ascent has done some weird stuff on the web. We’ve had some clients come to us with some big, bizarre, or otherwise unusual custom requirements for their online systems. We’ve integrated with ancient in-house systems, and we’ve been the first to ever integrate with newly released API’s. We’ve even built entire e-commerce systems from scratch when it was determined that no existing solution could handle it just-right. So please, bring us your e-commerce project, whether it’s a simple store that can launch with a click of a few buttons, or a complex scenario that will take some real rocket science to launch. We’ll get you selling.