The Significance of Bringing eCommerce to Your Small Business

Owning a successful business in today’s society is hard. You have to be prepared to compete in a global market, not just a local one. Gone are the days of the family-owned toy stores down the road, like you see in the movies. People just aren’t at home, waiting by the mailbox for the Sears catalog to come. These days everything comes with instant gratification: a couple clicks and your Christmas shopping is done, without even leaving your chair, let alone your house. This is what you, as a store owner, have to be ready to compete with in today’s market. So you need to think about how investing in ecommerce could increase your reach and your sales beyond your local market. I know it is hard to come to terms with the idea that we can’t just be the family store down the road that everyone knows and loves. We all want to live in a close-knit community where everyone knows their neighbors, but, let’s face it, we live in a society where most people socialize and purchase their goods online. Think about our grocery stores: most of our produce, eggs, milk, etc. come from other states, even when there are farms right down the road and in neighboring towns. Most of our electronics and other goods come from other countries. So why would you expect your customers to act any differently? The average consumer (which is who you want to appeal to, as they hold the largest share of the market) will, by nature, find the most convenient and least expensive method of procuring their needs and wants. This is why, as a shop owner, you should invest time into implementing an ecommerce site. There is no more big fish in a small pond today, you now are a small fish in a big pond. Allow yourself the chance to grow your business and take it to the next level.

In this two week series, we will uncover some common ecommerce options and their pros and cons, the importance of customization, and important options to consider regarding payment processing, customer service and product reviews. We’ll start with the important stuff first:

What’s out there?

Some popular stand-alone ecommerce solutions:

• Shopify: the Pros to shopify: it has an easy to use template,  which you can optimize the design, you can easily add and organize product and create blog posts from a single administration dashboard. It has built-in mobile commerce that includes iPhone app and mobile storefront, marketing tools, coupon codes, integrates with Google Analytics which will allow you to automatically track customer purchases and shopping cart transactions, easily connects to Google Analytics data and has built-in features that can track your stores analytics and progress over time. The cons that I have found while researching Shopify is that not only do you have to pay merchant fees and PayPal fees, you also have to pay Shopify 2% of your total sales.That could total up to at least 5 ½ to 6% in fees. Another Con it has is that it doesn’t handle a full featured Multi-category store. If  your store deals with a lot of categories and sub-catagories Shopify isn’t the ecommerce platform for your needs.
• Bigcommerce: here are the pros to Bigcommerce platform: it is a good choice for any small business that wants to start an online store and maintain an eBay business. Bigcommerce offers features for hosting, store design, SEO, mobile commerce, marketing and inventory. Plus you can integrate your online stores with eBay listings from within the Bigcommerce platform. Bigcommerce offers easy-to-use wizards to create trackable coupons that give customers a dollar or percentage discount on their order. The cons of big commerce are there is no built in email marketing solution. Not really a problem if you prefer to use MailChimp or Aweber, but some people like to keep everything in one package. They have proven to have unreliable support at times, list all options and settings (even if you have disabled them), and they do not have an efficient method for creating wholesaler logins. If you need to support both retail and wholesale customers, Bigcommerce is not for you.
• Goodsie: Is really simple to use. New merchants who are able to use Google’s Gmail or Docs will have no problem with Goodsie. It’s easy to accept payments via PayPal, has basic reporting is abillity. It will get a new merchant with limited resources moving — and even profiting — until the store is a bit more grown up then you will see it’s limitations. So here are the downsides: the service lacks many of the onsite marketing tools and features that can take an ecommerce business from good to great. For example, every ecommerce store can benefit from a blog, which is not really available on Goodsie. So a merchant will need to open a blog on another platform and link to it from the Goodsie site.There was also nothing like wishlists, product comparisons, product reviews, or layered and faceted navigation. There was not even a site search that I could find.There are also a few non-merchandising parts of the service that could improve, including image support on pages. Design choices are limited too — as is often the case with “easy-to-use” platforms.Bottom line, if you want to open an ecommerce store on a shoestring budget, Goodsie is a good option.
• Volusion: Is a good platform for businesses that have recurring business and subscriptions type business such as coffee, vitamins and consumables. Cons to volusions that I found were complaints of cart timing out resulting in loss of orders as well as upset customers when your online store drops their order. Since Volusion started hosting their own websites, customers seem to be struggling with downtime with their sites.

Some popular ecommerce solutions that integrate into brick-and-mortar retail management software:

• NCR Retail Online: the fully integrated companion to NCR CounterPoint offers a full, robust solution. Here are all the add-ons and modifications that you are able to fully integrate to NCR Retail Online. The integration agent automatically transfers items, categories, customers, orders, and more between CounterPoint and your webstore. Data exchange occurs every 15 minutes from the website to CounterPoint, and from CounterPoint to the website every 30 minutes. Pros: items, categories, prices, inventory quantities, etc. come straight from CounterPoint, so you only have to enter the information once. Online orders download automatically, so you do not have to re-key orders. Inventory adjusts automatically, whether an order is placed online or in the store. Cons: higher upfront costs for implementation and setup than the stand-alone ecommerce solutions.

• UniteU: integrates with many retail management software solutions (CounterPoint and RetailPro v9, for example). Their Retail API boasts a robust feature sets for asset management, ratings & reviews, shopping cart and checkout. Cons: you may need to have an internal IT resource to manage the integration after initial implementation.

• Intuit: integrates with Homestead (formerly Intuit Websites) offers an easy site builder, customizable templates, royalty free images, product management, no start up fee and a free trial. Marketing tools and other features can be added on for an additional monthly fee. Cons: Only the Advanced Storefront Enterprise option is integratable with your existing back-end system. The pricing is not very transparent, and you may get locked into higher credit card processing fees.

Stand-alone Ecommerce vs. Integrated Ecommerce: Which is better?

It really depends on your business and its unique needs of which would be a better fit for your business. Both solutions have pros and cons. For instance, if you don’t have a brick and mortar store, and you aren’t in need for inventory control, and all you are running  is an ecommerce store site, I would highly recommend using a stand-alone solutions to fit all your business needs. However, if you are a brick and mortar retailer looking to expand your reach, and add convenience for your customers, then it would be wise to invest in an integrated ecommerce solution. Whatever you choose to do, make sure to review a few solutions and determine which one will best meet the needs of your business now, and will sustainable solution for your business in the future.