Starting an ecommerce store is easier than you think! See why and how to start yours.
Ecommerce site – possible problems
Of course it is not all that rosy. There are difficulties you will have to overcome and some problems you should be aware of. As you will see they are not that numerous and can be easily overcome.
It is true that many online customers look for low price. They, however, also do look for availability of items that are hard to buy where they live. In such case price is not deciding factor.
A lot of people in Ireland shop in online stores in the UK. Generally speaking those stores offer goods cheaper than their competitors in Ireland. Fortunately for Irish online shop owners, many of them do not ship to Ireland and if they do, their shipping rates are very high.
You may also be worried about dealing with credit cards payment. There is nothing to be worried about. Credit card payments are made using external gateways and you never deal with sensitive information that could lead to legal liabilities.
You may be aware of scams that can be dangerous to your online business. Those scams mostly involve payments with stolen credit cards. These are especially dangerous if made through Paypal. Paypal offers no real protection to seller, should somebody (customer, credit card company) decide to cancel transaction you have no go back, you will be charged on your credit card and just lose your money.
Probability of falling for those scams in Ireland is very small. There are however certain countries you should be very careful when trading with. If you decide to trade with higher risk countries you should always use bank transfer instead of credit card payment – this protects you against cancelled payments and use of stolen cards.
You will have to dedicate some time to learn how to manage your online shop. Half to full day training session usually does the trick. Of course there is always more to learn, but after one session you will be able to perform all necessary actions (creating products, uploading images, managing stock, fulfilling orders etc ) with confidence.
How to start an online store?
It all depends how, excuse this jargon, “mission critical” your ecommerce site has to be. If your company expects millions in turnaround, hundreds of thousands of customers and so on you have no choice but to go with a design company that has proven track record of providing solutions to corporate sector.
If you business falls into small/medium category, or if you are just trying to figure out how ecommerce will work for your business my advice is as follows:
Start small, but start fast. Make sure your designer uses popular Open Source software like Magento, WP Ecommerce / WooCommerce for WordPress (my favorite as you get nicely functional website apart form the store) or Joomla/Drupal based solutions (again, you get full-functional website and blog here as well). These solutions offer level of functionality that often surpasses corporate grade commercial software you simply can not afford to buy and run.
Avoid exotic solutions based on shop software built in-house by the design company. You will get tied to this particular company and then, more than likely, mercilessly charged for things you would otherwise get much cheaper.
Inhouse built software will be often impossible or extremely expensive to modify to suit your business needs.
By going with Open Source you are always free to move, as the software is free and there is plenty of designers who know it well. You will be able to change design company at will. Popular Open Source packages usually have tools that allow you to migrate products to different software package should you ever need to do so.
Get online with some early, no-frills version of your shop as fast as you can and test it in real life environment. This way you will see if it works for you and what improvements you need the most – then invest in them.
When starting your online e-commerce store you do not know if it is going to succeed. It makes sense to start with minimum investment and expand from there when, and only when your shop proves to be making money.
Start now, while in Ireland there is still plenty of space for everybody. Over the years to come being successful with online shop will become increasingly difficult and expensive.
