Look after the pennies

Start-ups often begin with high hopes and a desire to own a proper online shop. All good, but many also fail in the first year or run out of cash. So for the first year, examine every penny you spend. Start selling on marketplaces which require no investment (eBay, Amazon) and if you need your own online shop, consider open source or budget-friendly off-the-shelf solutions. Unless you are entering a design-conscious market, having your own design with your custom-made shop can wait for year 2.

Acorns need time

Start-ups are often compared to acorns growing into mighty oaks. A good comparison, but don’t forget how long oaks need to grow to a decent size. So give yourself time. Don’t rely on breaking even in year 1. If you do, great, but the marketplace may be tougher than expected so have enough money to keep going into year 2 and 3. Sometimes good businesses fail simply because they run of out money. Don’t let this happen to you.

Don’t have one plan, have many

Successful businesses often get sales from many avenues – they don’t just have one marketing / sales plan, but many. Sales may come by word of mouth, via Google, forums, blogs, twitter, social networking, advertising, brick & mortar shops, fairs, expos, markets, ….. and the list goes on. The important lesson is that you need to find out what works for your business and build up several channels. Relying on just one source hardly ever works and makes you very vulnerable. So get out there & sell wherever you can.

Take responsibility

There’s lots of advice available to start-ups and it’s a good idea to gather as much info as you can before risking your life savings. But accept that in the end, you are in charge and nobody else can make your business a success. You need to be very clear what you want sell how and have the vision to follow it through. Listen to advice given, evaluate it, but feel confident enough to defend your own ideas if you feel it’s the right way for your business. For encouragement try a book by Richard Branson – he’s a great example of how perceived wisdom isn’t always right.

Start small, then keep developing

Start-ups often struggle to draw up a spec for their first site. Starting with a blank canvas, although a great opportunity, is usually a very hard thing to do. But don’t be tempted to base your site spec on the competition. For starters, don’t assume that their site works well for them – for all you know, they might hate it and be busy on planning a redesign. Equally, young businesses like to “look proper” but having a shop which looks like all the others can make you look bland and be counter-productive. For start-ups it’s often a good strategy to start with a basic site with a view to develop/redesign after the first 12 months. Successful sites tend to be under ongoing development, so view your site as an ongoing process – start small, then develop your site as your business grows.

7 steps:
1. Have a business plan
2. Put together a list of requirements
3. Research payment systems
4. Decide on who does what
5. Look into the future
6. Make your choice
7. Test, test and test again

1. Have a business plan

Established businesses will already have this, but start-ups and especially anyone exploring the idea of selling online may start out with a hazy desire to sell online. The days though of just having a shop are history and if you want to survive online, you must be clear on what you sell (products), whom you sell it to (customer group) and how you’re going to sell it (marketing). So if you haven’t yet got a business plan, now’s the time to write one.

2. Put together a list of requirements

Now that you know what your shop is all about, write down what you need your online shop to do. If you e.g. sell clothing then tracking attribute stock (sizes, colours) is important. If you sell B2B having the ability to differentiate prices based on customer group can be vital. If you want to sell overseas, multiple currencies and/or languages are required. You can also capture design requirements e.g. fashion shops will need a different feel to discount office products. [see end of post for some suggestions]

3. Research payment systems

Taking money online is the heart of your shop. Some payment systems such as PayPal have wide support, but others may not be available with your chosen cart. Getting a payment integration written for you usually requires a decent budget (e.g. paying a week’s development time), so if you have a specific payment system in mind, make sure there’s an existing payment integration available.

4. Decide on who does what

Have a think about who will be doing the build of the shop, the design and the maintenance. If you are intending to do it yourself, then an easy to use design templating system could save lots of time. If you intend to outsource to a design/development agency, then research going market rates to see how it fits with your budget. If you employ staff, consider whether you need role-based permissions and training for using the admin area.

5. Look into the future

Software doesn’t stand still. Currently most shops/servers are run on PHP5/MySQL5 but PHP6 and MySQL6 are both in development and will impact on shopping cart scripts. Same goes for security vulnerabilities. It therefore pays to choose a cart which is actively maintained so you can upgrade your shop when needed. Forums and past release schedules can give you a good feel for the activity around a cart.

6. Make your choice

Now that you’ve got your list, you can do an evaluation of the shopping carts you’ve had in mind and see how they measure up. A simple tick list system usually does the trick. Ignore features which may sound interesting but are not on your list. If you don’t need widget ABC, then having widget ABC won’t help even if it’s a really cool widget. [ we're currently working on a comparison of popular open source shopping carts which we'll publish in this blog soon!]

7. Test, test and test again

Before committing to a cart, give it a test run. Open source software can be downloaded for free and run e.g. with XAMPP on your PC. Paid software may have a free trial period. Try using the shop with a few categories, products and test orders – this will give you a feel for the admin and test how easy it will be to run the shop. Switching carts can be a hassle once you’ve got customer/order/product data so you’re likely to be using this cart for the next years.

And if you’ve followed this process, you should now have the confident to launch the shop with the shopping cart which is right for you!

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Suggestions for requirements:

Stock Control
Attribute Stock Tracking (variations of a product e.g. size)
Payment integrations
Shipping methods
Currency
Languages
Integration with accounting software
Integration with drop ship suppliers
Reports and CSV export of data
CSV import of products
Manually entering orders in admin
Managing refunds/returns
Multiple product images
Cross Sell
Product Bundles
WYISWYG editor support
CMS for adding/deleting/editing pages
Newsletter management
SSL handling (shared vs full SSLs)
URL rewriting
Metatags (description, keywords)
Discount Coupons
Selling virtual products / downloads
Customer group based pricing
Multiple shop frontends