Building eCommerce without (much) coding (Lecture 5)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 24, 2006 [5270 views]

This is a new lecture and reflects the changing state of ecommerce tools and the opportunities to make (small amounts of) money through working with other existing sites and businesses.

What do you want to do?

1. Explore how ecommerce works?
2. Make some (additional) money?
3. Sell your own products?
4. Sell products from other suppliers?
5. Compete with an established online business?
6. Sell electronic products?
7. Avoid any HTML?
8. Avoid any software installation?
9. Run your own server?
10. Complete a university project?

10 ways of building an online shop

Start by launching your own site using a tool such as www.blogger.com

1. You will normally need a site as the destination to which you will try and drive customers
2. Choose a memorable name and make it look professional
3. Use it to experiment with many ecommerce ideas such as content, customer journeys, tracking, reputation building, search engine optimisation and PPC advertising

Become an affiliate

1. Choose an affiliate broker such as Commission Junction, TradeDoubler, Affiliate Window, MyAffiliate
2. Search for companies that offer affiliate schemes directly
3. Companies such as John Lewis pay 4-10% for a referral of a customer who buys from their site
4. Sign-up noting the restrictions on what you are allowed to do
5. Select the partners or products that you want to ‘sell’
6. Download banners, buttons or dynamic elements
7. Embed affiliate codes into links to allow tracking of clicks
8. Commission will be paid once a threshold has been reached
9. Consider how you add value to the stores themselves: additional information, hand picked products,

Become an Amazon Associate and build an Amazon aStore

1. Next generation affiliate scheme that helps you build a complete shop of Amazon products
2. Select products carefully
3. Use the automated tools to build a store
4. Add information to the products you sell
5. Customise the look and feel
6. Amazon pays about 5% for each purchase generated by your store and pays quarterly once you have generated £10

Run Google Adsense advertising

1. Allow Google to place text (and sometimes image) advertising on your page
2. Sign-up for the scheme noting carefully the rules about Click Fraud
3. Select the advertising formats you want
4. Download the code needed to link to Google’s advertising server
5. Create valuable content around a theme or topic
6. Google will examine the content of your pages and show advertising that is relevant to the words you use
7. Never click on your own ads or get others to click for you. This is click fraud and it will be detected and Google will ban you
8. Google will not reveal exactly how it calculates the amount you will be paid

Sell on eBay

1. First scheme to allow you sell your own products
2. Sign up as a seller
3. List your items using either the auction or instant sales formats
4. You choose your own prices and shipping costs etc
5. Be prepared to pack and ship your products quickly and effectively once they have been purchased
6. Poor customer service will result in a poor reputation which will make future sales hard
7. Build a good reputation to increase buyer confidence
8. Regular sellers tend to move from offering a few items to ‘shops within shops’

Use PayPal links

1. PayPal was bought by eBay as its main payment partner
2. PayPal now offers services to other sites that want to securely take money without having to negotiate a full merchant agreement with banks or payment gateways
3. Customers can pay with their PayPal account (usually linked to their bank account) or with a credit card
4. Sign-up for a PayPal account and go through the full (and long) identity approval process
5. Ideal for supporting simple ecommerce where a single product is being offered (often without a shopping cart)
6. Build store pages
7. Download link code and buttons from PayPal’s site and paste them into your pages
8. Customers click on these special links and are taken to PayPal to make payment. #Confirmed paid orders and send to you. Dispatch the goods promptly

Use another payment provider such as Kagi.com

1. Alternative payment provider favoured by shareware developers
2. Simple to sign-up and straightforward for customers to buy
3. Simpler than PayPal but perhaps less well known which may affect sales

Buy Actinic Catalogue

1. One of a number of “Shop in a box” software products
2. Purchase and download
3. Install on your own (or rented) server
4. Configure (which is fairly straightforward)
5. Use the inbuilt store management tools to customise and populate your store
6. Actinic comes with payment modules to link to PayPal (and others) or to link with a #Payment Service Provider (such as SecPay)
7. The shopping experience is competent but fairly rigid
8. Actinic shops feel like Actinic shops

Use an OpenSource ecommerce system such as OSCommerce

1. Download free software components from sites such as SourceForge
2. Install. This is more complex than commercial software and there are normally problems
3. OSCommerce sites look like OSCommerce sites (and often have too much functionality)
4. We will demonstrate this approach in a later session

Build a store in SecondLife

1. SecondLife is an immersive 3D environment in which you are represented by an Avatar. You can meet, chat, play games and you can buy and sell virtual goods. #Over 1 million people are signed up.
2. SecondLife has an economy based on a currency called Linden Dollars which are exchangeable for real money (in both directions)
3. You can rent land, build shops and houses and sell ‘modelled’ products to other inhabitants
4. Popular products (and services) can generate revenue

Limitations of these approaches

1. Many of these techniques will allow you to turn over a few hundred or exceptionally a few thousand pounds a month
2. The larger sums will only happen if you dedicate considerable time to adding value to your store and promoting it
3. Most of the people who make money using approaches such as Affilates, eBay, AdSense and SecondLife make very little money but may enjoy it as a hobby. They often devote huge amounts to time to this activity.
4. Without promotion and probably advertising the number of people who will visit your store and purchase is probably very low
5. Consider how well these approaches fit with your branding and design
6. Customers will never be fooled into believing that these approaches are equal to traditional brands
7. Some traditional brands have been damaged by taking these ‘cheap’ routes
8. Be careful whether you ‘own’ the end customer or whether you have passed that relationship (along with most of the work) to your partner. Remember that generating new customers is much more expensive than repeat business and so explore whether any approach you take allows you to maintain a relatrionship with your customers
9. You do need to understand the basic operations of a site and some HTML
10. It is hard to create tailored customer journeys. You will often be unable to customise the software or your site as much as you would want to and this can result in a templated “cookie-cutter” experience
11. Big brands often one to transfer parts of their offline experience online and this may not be possible with these approaches
12. The same applies to complex business logic or promotions. It may be impossible to integrate loyalty cards, gift selection, real-time availability or complex shipping into your store if it has been built in this way.

Notes for students doing eCommerce related projects in their final year

These approaches are worth exploring. Indeed we have reached the point where I would expect every student who is doing a project related to ecommerce to have explored at least a couple of them. It is simply unacceptable to present an ecommerce prototype built using PHP/ASP and SQL/MySQL that exhibits less functionality than that which can be built in an afternoon using the above systems. If I am your supervisor this would be suicidal and if you are unlucky enough to have me as your second marker, be warned!

Start a blog and join Second Life today, experiment with affliliates or AdSense and get a sense of what ecommerce is really about even if this is not the main thrust of your project.

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