Sidebar: Why Not Set Up Your Own Online Store?
Web Commerce Today, Issue 23, June 15, 1999
This article contains older information. Go here for newer information on ecommerce and selling online.
Call me prejudiced, if you must. But I feel that anything worth doing at all is worth doing right. Unless you have an exceptional in-house team, or are a renaissance person yourself, you need to outsource construction of your online store. Otherwise you're probably doomed to always being a very small player in an increasingly competitive environment.Let me tell you a horror story. Several years ago I built a 3-page website for a small cataloger whose goal was to get orders for his catalog. Conrad (not his real name) was delighted with the number and quality of orders for his catalog, many from overseas markets he hadn't been able to reach before. After this success I kept urging him to set up an online store. With Open Market ShopSite Manager, I told him, you can sell your products directly and save yourself a lot of money in catalog printing and distribution costs. "One of these days ..." he'd say.
One day I returned to his site to find that he had indeed taken my advice. He had purchased a copy of ShopSite Manager and put his products into an online catalog. But as I looked at it I was appalled. It was horrible! Sure, his products were all orderable, but Conrad lacked any aesthetic sense whatsoever. Many of the product pictures were too large for the space. The overall impression was extremely amateurish.
It really wouldn't have cost him a great deal, I thought to myself, to hire a developer to design the site graphics and a navigation system, and give him some tips on how prepare product pictures. Instead, he decided to save a few dollars and do it himself. "Conrad, I see you have all your products online," I said, when I talked to him next.
"Yes," he replied, "isn't it great!" I didn't have the heart to tell him. He didn't have the experience or the taste to know poor from excellent. What could I say, except to wish him well?
But if you're an inveterate do-it-yourselfer, I probably haven't convinced you. So let me save you some trouble along the way.
Yahoo! Store
One of the best do-it-yourself stores out there is Yahoo! Store (http://store.yahoo.com/ -- formerly ViaWeb). If you have under 50 products to sell, you can set your store up within their system for $100 per month, and it's likely to look pretty good. Nearly all Yahoo! Stores look alike, mind you, and they're difficult for developers to do it for you. But they have a pretty good system, including superior statistical analysis of your site traffic and a way to tell which links bring you the most actual sales. Yahoo! directory is especially inclined to list their own stores (though other deserving sites often have trouble getting their attention), and the size of Yahoo! to make deals for other merchant services and promotions could turn into a significant advantage.
Microsoft FrontPage
I find it hard to recommend FrontPage -- or any webpage editor -- to build an online store, unless it's a very small one.
Many do-it-yourselfers ask me, "How can I build an online store. I already have FrontPage." FrontPage may be a great tool for website design (though I recommend HotMetal Pro instead, and use HotDog Pro myself), but a webpage editor is the wrong tool to design a store. Stores with more than a dozen or two products need a product database, rather than a dozen product pages constructed one-at-a-time with FrontPage.
The real issue with an online store is not: How easy is it to build? but How easy is it to maintain in the long run? If you build a store based on a webpage editor you make it:
- Difficult to redesign,
- Slower to add products,
- Harder to put the same product on several pages,
- Painstaking to do global price changes, and
- Tough to scale up to offer, say, hundreds of products.
A webpage editor should be used primarily to build a template. The contents of the template are generated from a database.
The smallest stores, however, can be built with a webpage editor and with the HTML ordering code to a shopping cart program pasted into these standard web pages. For some small shopping cart programs see: "Shopping Carts for Small Sites," Web Commerce Today, January 15, 1998. http://wilsonweb.com/wct1/980115smallcarts.cfm