eCommerce Site Checklist

With more than 15 years of experience building ecommerce websites on a variety of platforms, we can give you a quick overview of the decisions you will need to make, as well as the consequences of those decisions. We’re here to guide you through choosing an ecommerce site in an effective, streamlined way.

We say it with some trepidation, because choosing the wrong partner can have long-term consequences in the ecommerce web development business.  There is a real trade-off for useful, ongoing options versus the economies of hiring an ecommerce development company with templated, premade sites. With these generalizations out of the way, let’s proceed to the decision making.

Decision 1:
Do you already have a shopping cart with products loaded, or will you be starting from scratch?

How you will proceed depends largely on this question. Rest assured, while there is a right answer, there are no perfect situations. You’ll see there are both advantages and disadvantages.

A. Starting from Scratch

Congratulations! You have the pleasure of no restrictions! Rather than being overwhelmed by the number of carts out there, the possible customizations and the various developers at your disposal, try to rejoice in the fact that you aren’t yet beholden to any of them: You don’t already have products loaded or money tied up in modifications that will simply vanish if you decide to change to a new shopping cart. You also don’t have development to such an extent that you’re stuck with the people who wrote it. You’re completely free! As long as you have a clear mind about what you need, your cart can be as simple or as complex as you desire. Here are a few other advantages to anyone starting from scratch:

1. You will be up to date with the latest technology from day one, so your site will be secure, fast and far more usable for your visitors.
2. You will be mobile-ready without having to retheme your entire cart.
3. Your online identity is yours to mold into whatever you envision. You are the parent of a newborn internet presence, and the exciting part is laying the foundations for how it will grow and what it will become.
4. You can negotiate between developers and software providers with an advantage, since, rather than you losing money having to switch to a new system, they lose money if they don’t accommodate you.

So now that the pure exhilaration of your raw power to make decisions has set in, you have one very important decision to consider…

If you have special requirements, even the most robust cart might not fulfill your needs without modification. And let’s face it, the only reason to set up a cart is to make your life easier. Anything short of that is pointless. Some examples of the types of functions we’ve coded that did not come standard with their carts are:

• Accepting Net30 payments.
• Adding surcharges for certain situations.
• Shipping certain products only to certain zip codes.
• Offering tax-free checkout for institutions.
• Hidden pricing for wholesalers or distributors.

Conversely, if you are able to get by with only the functionality provided by your cart of choice, then your life becomes much simpler, as long as it doesn’t place undue stress on your business process.

If you do not have any special requirements, proceed to Decision 2: Choose a Cart Type and skip to section 2C: How to Choose.

B. Pre-Existing Cart

The choices for a business that has already gone through the process of setting up a cart aren’t as open as starting from scratch. However, there are still many advantages for the person who already has an online presence:

1. You have experience with the process and know what to expect. You have also, inevitably, given some thought as to what you would have liked to have done differently, which will come in handy the second time around. Could you have lived without that crazy mod you shelled out a ton of cash for? Now you know the answer.
2. You already have basic systems set up, like your payment gateway, accounting system, shipping carriers, SSL, etc. Even if you move to a new cart, you still have these to show for it.
3. Your domain and your pages have history, and that provides a small boost to your website’s SEO value over a new ecommerce retailer.
4. You have your products loaded into a cart of some kind. If you did your homework, you should also be able to export or import these into another cart, or at least have a spreadsheet that will make entering products easier the second time around.
5. All of your product images, if they are quality, will not need to be retaken. It may not seem like it, but this is huge.

Advantages aside, you’ve got some very important things to consider when working with a cart you’ve invested time and money into. Mainly how much of your investment will you abandon in favor of other advantages and whether it is worth it.

This is one of the hardest decisions to make. It is the quintessential fork in the road for ecommerce retailers. Luckily, we’re here to help you figure it out with some important considerations, the first of which is this:

Reasons abound why this may be the case. Setting aside the fact that even performing a redesign alone still requires a great deal of work, consider the following list of reasons you may want to consider a migration over an upgrade/redesign:

1. Your current cart simply may not possess the functionality you require, nor the ability to improve the functionality.
   1. If your cart’s inability to provide a particular function is either driving away customers or making your internal business process slow, it is costing you money all the same.
   2. There are quite a few carts that do not enable changes to the core files, meaning you’re stuck with whatever they offer. More on this in the section on Choosing a Cart.
2. No matter how much work you put into it, your cart might be slow or take too many steps to purchase a product.
   1. We say it constantly and we mean it: Never come between your customers and a sale. This includes selecting or sticking with a cart they will abandon in the first 3 seconds.
   2. Some carts are simply faster than others. You may or may not be using one of them.
3. The more customizations you’ve added to your cart, the harder it becomes to perform upgrades to the platform and plugins – a.k.a. code bloat.
   1. Without going into too much detail, every customization you add to the site increases the complication of the code, so every update requires looking through the code to manually blend the newly updated code with the custom changes. Since this requires the undivided attention of a developer, the more you add, the more expensive it can get, even after you’ve paid for the initial changes.
4. You may be paying monthly costs for a shopping cart that can only be hosted with the developers, and the monthly costs are going up.
   1. Because you cannot move the cart, cannot keep anything from the cart, and cannot start again without a major investment, some companies take advantage of this fact and raise your rates as high as they can, because they know it’ll be hard to decide to start all over again. They also know that every time you decide to stay, the decision to leave gets harder the next time they raise their rates as well.

Not moving to a new cart may seem like a money saver, until you quantify the real cost to your bottom line. To be clear, as developers, we have no skin in this game, since both retheming and total migration require developer services. But we find in our conversations with prospective clients that there is a misconception regarding the cost of migration vs. retheme, mainly that retheming is thought to be cheaper, and that causes bad decisions to be made on bad assumptions. Our advice is to shed your preconceptions and give both options their due consideration.

Certainly, many retailers choose to stick with the familiar for an obvious reason: There are fewer surprises, and we entrepreneurs don’t like surprises. However, knowing a catalog can typically be imported into a new cart for less expense and time than on your first cart makes switching to a new cart platform an easier decision.

We must be careful to mention that intercart imports don’t always go perfectly, but usually they at least get you most of the way. Discussing your migration options with an experienced developer beforehand should mitigate any risk. Never jump into migrating to a new cart with both feet just because you’re told by the cart creators that it is capable of migrating products! We cannot stress this enough. Many cart creators, especially those in the SaaS business, will say anything to get you to sign with them.

Decision 2:
Choose a Cart: SaaS, Open-Source or Ground-up Solution?

Before you answer that, we’re going to define each of these and go over the advantages and disadvantages of each compared with the others. By the end of this section, you should have a good idea of which cart type is right for your business.

A. Cart Types

Given the plethora of shopping carts available, we’ve broken them down into the most basic decision. One will affect everything you do going forward, but one which most of your ecommerce peers aren’t even aware of. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to first decide on a cart and then be stuck in a more important, broad category that may not fit your business model, right?

Examples of ground-up software cannot be provided, since they are their own, unique software.

B. Comparison of Cart Types

In a previous discussion comparing the Pros and Cons of the 3 Main Cart Types, we established that the size of your business is the biggest factor in deciding which cart type to implement. As with everything, however, this guideline cannot provide a black-or-white answer (just as there is no black-or-white with regard to your business). You will need to be an active participant in the thinking process. Fortunately, the chart below and the final part of this section, How to Choose, should provide the tools you’ll need to find the best option for your business. Please take a look at the summary of our cart type comparison below before moving on to the next topic.

It should come as no surprise that, with 191.4 out of a possible 248 points, open-source is the cart type suitable for most businesses. It is lower cost, more robust and more flexible all around. The fact that so many people use open-source shopping carts already means fetching the top score is not an anomaly, it is a verification. Stores that have begun on SaaS may find some benefit in moving to open-source if their needs aren’t quite being met.

SaaS falls in at second, due to its fast start-up ability, lower upfront costs, and generally worry-free maintenance. Many retailers just starting out will tend to opt for SaaS for the above reasons. Its overall score of 155.8 out of 248 puts it into most considerations for small and medium-sized business, alongside open-source options.

Ground-up may fall into last place, but that is because it is a very special type of business that requires ground-up development to exactly meet its needs, while having greater budget flexibility over small and medium-sized businesses. Fetching less than half of the possible points shows it is not the best solution for most businesses. Last but not least, ground-up software does not need to compete with open-source or SaaS, because it is doing fine on its own terms.

C. How to Choose

The information provided in the beginning portion of this section, Decision 2, is provided for reference and is optional but highly suggested reading. Most of you will skip over 2A and 2B to come directly to this How to Choose section and be given an option to determine which cart type is right for your business. If you are curious as to how we arrived at our conclusions regarding your business, there is a summary of our reasons after you have followed the list below. For now, please begin at item 1 below.

1. If you are a small to medium-sized business, continue to #2. Otherwise, please proceed to #11.
2. If you do not have what we call “position,” or a genuine uniqueness that distinguishes you from your competitors, please continue to #3. Otherwise, please proceed to #11.
3. If you do not have national brand recognition continue to #4. Otherwise, please proceed to #11.
4. If you do not have a high level of certainty your products will sell online, continue to #5. Otherwise, please proceed to #11.
5. If you do not have a fair level of certainty your products will sell online, continue to #6. Otherwise, please proceed to #10.
6. If you have a budget of less than $200k to spend, continue to #7. Otherwise, please proceed to #11.
7. If you have a budget of less than $10k to spend, continue to #8. Otherwise, please proceed to #10.
8. If you do not have need of specialized functionality that would make your shopping cart experience unique, or you will not be selling products that require special checkout steps or ordering procedure, continue to #9. Otherwise, please proceed to #10.
9. Choose SaaS. Please read the corresponding section, C1, for more information.
10. Choose Open-source. Please read the corresponding section, C2, for more information.
11. Choose Ground-up. Please read the corresponding section, C3, for more information.

Will You Sell Digital or Physical Products or Both?

Digital products carry no stock. Nothing has to be shipped. Very little customer service intervention is required with the right setup. The only thing you have to worry about if you exclusively sell digital products is protecting intellectual property and fast download speeds. Whichever shopping cart you choose, make sure the server you put it on is fast and secure, and especially ensure the cart has methods to protect your digital products.

Physical products carry a lot of headaches, one of which is managing inventory. Most open-source carts have some form of inventory export, but they typically require additional plugins that are not cheap. SaaS isn’t much better as they will charge you an additional monthly cost that, too, isn’t cheap. The other consideration is printing shipping labels and managing tracking numbers. These functions don’t usually come with the default cart, so choose wisely if you expect to ship a lot of products on a daily basis. Make sure you pick the cart that best suits your operation rather than fitting the operation to suit the cart.

Are You a Reseller or Manufacturer?

For resellers, the margins tend to be low enough that opting for the simplest cart with the least amount of money upfront is usually the best decision. So for many resellers in this predicament, SaaS cart types work best. The drawback is both the greater long-term expense that eats into already narrow profit margins and the lack of ability to create a unique checkout process that best suits the types of products being sold. For resellers with greater positive cash flow to start, open-source may be the better investment.

Manufacturers, by contrast, have it much easier. They set the retail price, and the products sell for whatever price the manufacturer deems necessary. Their only price competition is other manufacturers creating similar products. For nearly every manufacturer, either a robust open-source investment or an enterprise level, custom built shopping cart makes the most sense.

Decision 3:
Will Someone in Your Organization Have the Skills to Enter Products, or Will You Need to Pay For Product Entry Services?

Product entry should not be taken lightly. It seems simple to the uninitiated, but the entire process of building your online catalog influences the cart’s performance at launch. If you aren’t prepared to take product entry extremely serious and really dig down to learn how each piece of information makes or breaks a page, then you’re rolling the dice.

You may be able to save yourself training, avoid confusion, limit any risk of incorrect entry becoming a liability for your cart’s performance, and speed up the process by hiring a developer to complete this process for you, whether as an agency or as a direct employee.

Decision 4:
In-house or outside agency?

Deciding whether to pay a company that specializes in developing ecommerce sites versus hiring a permanent team to do so within your operation is not an easy decision. If you hire an outside agency, you will get real experts that can walk you through every step of the process. They boil things down to only that which is important for you to consider and leave you free to think about your business rather than your website. The obvious downside is that agencies tend to be more expensive than an in-house development team. They may also have biases regarding which types of carts they recommend. Try to recognize when they are making a case for a cart that does not suit your business.

Conversely, an in-house development team requires someone within your organization to recognize and procure qualified individuals. If things don’t go according to plan, the team doesn’t have enough experience, or the project doesn’t seem to progress quickly enough, it will be up to you to recognize this. SaaS is not a relief from this fact of life, either. While SaaS tends to have shorter ramp up to launch, it still requires people with technical knowledge of shopping carts to facilitate.

To decide between hiring in-house versus an agency, use the following guidelines:

• If you have some knowledge of shopping carts already, have a clear vision of what you’d like from your cart, are or have a good project manager, and are able to recognize talent for development, hire in-house.
• If you have little to no experience or knowledge of ecommerce or how it should work for your business, but have a budget of around $10,000 or more and a great product, or if you absolutely need the best cart for your business, hire an agency.
• If you both have little to no experience with ecommerce and are not sure you’d be able to hire the right people, or if you don’t have a lot of budget to work with, hire an ecommerce consultant to help you make informed decisions.