Understanding e-commerce enabled websites

Just about anyone can quickly set up a presence on portals such as OLX or BidorBuy and start selling online. Establishing an independent e-commerce enabled website has also become much easier due to the development of innovative local online shop solutions such as Shopstar. Booksellers wishing to set up an online store will find out sooner or later that off-the-shelf e-commerce site solutions often don’t address their unique needs properly, and may not even be sufficiently customisable. In this article, I discuss three basic elements that distinguish e-commerce websites from other site types.

Payment gateways
These are e-commerce applications that authorise credit card payments. They are the online equivalent of a point of sale payment terminal or ‘card machine’. Some payment gateways can also handle other payment methods such as bitcoin, virtual wallets, vouchers and EFT payments. Payment gateways can integrate with the checkout (basket) facility on e-commerce enabled websites, and you can create payment buttons that can be included in e-mails, MMS or other online communications. Some e-commerce sites offer their customers a choice of payment gateways – for instance to provide options that serve local and international customers. There are a number of local and international payment gateway service providers available in South Africa, including Payfast, PayU, Pay4it, Sage Pay and PayPal to name but a few. Some only charge merchants per-transaction fees, whilst others may also include setup fees and recurring monthly fees. Noticeable by its continued absence in South Africa is a cost-effective, widely accepted solution to accommodate shoppers without credit cards or even bank accounts (such as learners looking to buy study guides). Innovative mobile payment solutions such as Zimbabwe’s EcoCash and others from countries such as Kenya and Nigeria lead the way in producing indigenous solutions for online merchants and their eager online customers.

Online inventory management
A vital component for online retail sites is a robust online content management system designed to manage online inventory. Products are stored as alphanumeric SKUs (stock-keeping units) within a section of the CMS – ISBN numbers can be used as SKUs if the website accommodates SKUs of 13 digits or more. Product attributes such as price, weight, dimensions and product surcharges are all managed here, as well as stock levels and shipping options. Each SKU should also allow you to include variants (for example colour and size). The system should make it possible for you to quickly create product specials and sales promotions across a number of selected products. These systems can sometimes integrate directly with accounting software packages, or through data exports.
An online bookshop can quickly rack up several thousand SKUs in the form of books. Acquiring, managing and inputting the data can become a time-consuming nightmare that is shared by both small online booksellers and the largest online retailers. Publishers may provide services for booksellers such as downloadable product metadata in the form of spreadsheets or provide them with access to databases containing customisable data outputs in a variety of formats. Commercial bibliographic services such as SAPnet, Booksite Afrika and Nielsen BookData provide the metadata of participating publishers. These commercial options offer the major benefit of curating uniform data across a wide number of publishers – some contain millions of titles; whereas the data curated by individual publishers will vary significantly in terms of quality and completeness. Small bits of omitted data can quickly trip you up – for instance, product weight: this may not be a crucial consideration for a bricks-and-mortar shop, but it is one for an online shop that is reliant on courier delivery, and for the correct calculation and charging of upfront shipping fees. Your e-commerce site may need to be able to link to live stock feeds, accommodate special data formats such as ONIX, and allow you to both export and import product data in bulk. You should also be aware of any restrictions applicable to the number of SKUs you can add to your site, as well as hosting fee structures that are linked to the number of SKUs you add, as this can increase your basic running costs significantly. To sell electronic content (such as e-books, music, video, images, games or software) an API integration will be needed to connect the site to the appropriate digital content delivery service/s.

Shopping basket / checkout facility
How easy is it to add an item to the basket (or trolley)? Some sites make it very easy to add multiple items to a basket directly from a single catalogue page displaying thumbnails of a wide range of products as each product thumbnail displays its own ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to basket’ button. Other site designs require the shopper to click on an individual product page to get to the same button, and then to navigate back out to start to add another product. For mobile shoppers this can quickly become quite cumbersome and frustrating, which leads quickly to abandoned transactions or at best, unnecessary telephonic or email enquiries. In some sites, the basket pops up as soon as you add an item to it, giving you the option to start the checkout process straight away, or to close the pop-up and continue shopping. In other site designs, a ‘proceed to checkout’ button appears. If the shopper continues to browse they will need to be able to locate the checkout page later, so it is important that this is visually and intuitively easy to locate and is persistent across pages. Baskets should have options that allow the shopper to remove an item from the basket or change the quantity ordered, options to specify delivery types and some can act as a wish-list, allowing the shopper to receive an email about the selected products without immediately making a purchase. Sophisticated baskets even have the capability of making automated add-on suggestions to the customer to try to maximise the transaction value.
You can equate this to the checkout funnel at supermarkets where you are herded through narrow walls of chocolates and sweets before making it to the till.

Alan Vesty