I’m always fascinated when people either merchants or web designers assume e-commerce should be “easy” or they’ll just write a quick shopping cart themselves because it’s a “simple” task only to find them stuck on the side of the e-commerce road later on either never launched or painted into a corner they hadn’t thought through.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe that vendors of e-commerce applications need to focus on usability and making the product a joy to use, however that’s a very different thing than e-commerce being “easy and simple”.
Most e-commerce sites are going to be up there in complexity with the largest projects of a person’s life, even the simple ones. If someone only has say 1 product and uses a digital means of delivery (therefore they don’t care about shipping, inventory or sales tax) then use you can make a simple site, connect to it via PayPal and that’s about as simple as it gets for e-commerce.
However most store owners don’t fit the description above, most store owners have dozens if not hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of products, spaced in multiple categories, and very often have special processes for dealing with different parts of their inventory.
Perhaps they’re selling fly fishing flies and their customers often buy multiple of the same product in various sizes and want to throw all of that in the shopping cart in one click, in addition they also sell live bait which requires special shipping and handling and finally they sell high end rods that normally require a phone call to confirm the sale. In a case like this inventory matters, a lot. And just because one size of a fly is out of stock doesn’t mean all of them are and since people buy them in bulk a high volume site would need strict inventory controls. In addition you’d have different shipping methods based on the basket contents and some cases where you need to figure out the sales flow so you don’t lose your bread and butter fly and bait orders while trying to engage a customer who probably needs a phone call. All of this needs to happen without hesitation because nothing kills conversions faster than waiting or non expected behaviors and finally if you get all the systems to line up correctly to maximize sales in this environment, then you actually capture the funds on the card (the “simple part”).
I equate building an online store to custom building or semi-custom building your home. A well built and designed home is clean, easy to navigate, comforting and secure, exactly as a well built and designed e-commerce site should be. This is the end result of lots of planning and pain staking effort, much like professional athletes who make the impossible seem easy, is a well honed online store that acts as a siren call to convince us this shouldn’t be hard to do.
E-commerce in my opinion is often overlooked as one of the greatest advancements and benefits of the technological age. While everyone races to the next “big thing”, this technological concept has fundamentally changed human behavior, which is no small task. I think it’s amazing, democratizing, empowering and a whole slew of other adjectives, just don’t call it “easy”.
About Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson is the Executive Vice President for Miva Merchant a popular online shopping cart software.
Rick has been with Miva Merchant since 1999 when he began at the original Miva Corporation as an outside sales representative and took over as Vice President of Sales in 2002 and ultimately as Executive Vice President in 2007.
Rick's more than 12 years of executive-level sales and marketing experience also includes his tenure as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Providence Systems, a privately held sales training company. At Providence Systems, Rick developed and executed the sales and marketing strategies that helped lead a successful corporate turnaround between 1998 and 2002.
Through his WHIR blog, Rick will cover ecommerce trends, products and services from the perspective of the online merchant. He will focus on best practice thinking, tools that help them improve their business and be on the look-out for the information that provides merchants the competitive edge to be successful.
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