Be careful, there are hundreds of people who will take your money in return for an all singing all dancing site, myself included but, without careful planning it will be nothing but a white elephant.

To sell online you need to compete in one of two areas

1. Price, you need to be significantly cheaper than the high street (and competitive with other online retailers)
2. Niche, you need to offer products not easily available on the high street, i.e. become a specialist

If you cannot compete strongly in one of these areas, forget it.

Then you need a marketing strategy, do not underestimate the cost and difficulty of this exercise. You will need both an online and offline marketing strategy, both of which can be expensive.

Both on and offline you will need to consider advertising costs in magazines, on websites or using technologies such as Adwords.

An online store is not like a physical shop, there is no ‘passing trade’, it is an extremely competitive industry and good search engine rankings are difficult to achieve, and take time to establish.

You need to consider payment gateways, on this note never store customers credit card details on your site (which a lot of open source applications have the facility to do). To store credit card details you really need to employ a security specialist, and if your reading this, the chances are you cannot afford one.

A famous example of what happens when you store credit card details on a site is a story of Playboy dot Com, whose customers received an E-Mail, containing their personal details and credit card number, informing them that the aforementioned credit card details were circulating the criminal underworld, and making some useful suggestions on how Playboy dot Com could improve their security .

A stunt like that would put most companies out of business.

In a nutshell, if you store credit card numbers on your site you will become a target for hackers, and they are good, way ahead of most of the people deploying E-Commerce sites, so leave that side of things to the professionals running payment gateways (Protx is a good one in the UK).

Then you need to consider shipping costs and packaging, what shipping options you will make available to customers. Most couriers factor weight and size into their shipping costs. This means knowing what your products and packaging weigh, and in some cases the volume too.

You need professional images of all your products, not a good photographer, find out how much that will cost too. There is little point in putting up a nice site if the images are poor.

Consider the time it will take to load (with the weight and shipping options), describe and price your products. It is not sufficient to give a brief description.

1. You need to explain products properly to customers
2. Google will not rank your site well if it has poor product descriptions

If you have an existing retail business, you need to reconcile your on and offline sales / stock. Integrating offline systems with your online store can be difficult, and consequently expensive. The alternative is to manually reconcile the systems, i.e. run two stock figures and keep jumping between them to keep them the same. Your online customer will not be happy if you have to mail them to say ‘I just sold my last one in the shop today’.

I think that’s enough for the time being, there is a lot more which I will post shortly…

Without content it is impossible to get a good rank in search engines, leaving many sites reliant on Adsense.

In order to get good search engine optimisation for your online store you need to bulk up your site.

Consider Amazon, if you use their site you will be familiar with the fact that they have book reviews, extracts from books, the titles and descriptions are keyworded, headings are used well etc.

Clearly Amazon have an advantage as they use bespoke software and have an army of people available to help generate this content.

For SME’s running E-Commerce an easy way to bulk up a site is to use a Blog.

Blogs have very good SEO properties, are easily installed under a “News” secition of an E-Commerce site and are one of the most efficient ways of creating content.

Surprisingly not many sites are doing this at the moment, but consider the possibilities:

• You can write extensive reviews of your own products
• Keyword these reviews
• Link reviews back to your E-Commerce site
• Write articles on industry news
• Write articles on the developments in your own business
• Bend any relevant content you discover to your service!

The only ‘problem’ with doing this is that the look and feel of the blog will not match that of the site.

This in itself will not stop you reaping the benefit of increased SEO, however, if you want to make it look more professional you will need to create a matching template for your blog.

This can be done cost effectively by using sites like getafreelancer.com where you can submit a project and have developers bid on it. Because there are a lot of developers in Eastern Europe and the far east prices are a lot lower than you can achieve in Western Europe.

If you do use getafreelancer or similar sites, make sure you understand the security implications of doing so, I will write a separate post on that soon!!

If you are using VirtueMart then you are at an advantage as there is already a blogging feature built into it. Unfortunately it is not a ‘proper’ blog, rather an aggregation of news postings.

Interestingly there is a WordPress plug in for VirtueMart / Joomla which ‘stuffs’ a wordpress blog into your site. This has a number of advantages over the default Joomla options, namely it is ‘proper blogging software.

Unfortunately, due to it being squeezed into VirtueMart / Joomla, WordPress it loses many of its SEO properties and you are limited in terms of what can be done with the wordpress template.

That said, if you want a free integrated solution then this is definitely worth considering.

I have to say, that although I think the JD-Wordpress plug in is really good, I am inclined to suffer the lack of cohesion between E-Commerce site and Blog to get the best from both technologies.

To be able modify the software yourself you will need to understand:

• PHP
• (X)HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript (an advantage rather than a requirement)

All come with installation scripts to help you deploy the application. Prior to installing you should read the accompanying documentation, particularly any information regarding security.

osCommerce (Open Source Commerce)

osCommerce is my favorite E-Commerce application, though it really shouldnt be! I say that because the default installation of osCommerce is ugly and contains a lot of really poor clip art that takes time to remove. Also, changing the design / layout in osCommerce can be difficult. There are a lot of features included within osCommerce, some of which you will probably want to disable, again this is a time consuming process.

The reason I still favor osCommerce in spite of its weaknesses is the large amount of contributions available. Contributions are programs (or modifications to existing code) submitted by users of the system, such as:

• STS (a templating system to allow the design to be changed mor easily)
• Froogle data feeder (submits all your products to Froogle, Googles price comparison tool)
• PDF catalog generators (automatically generates a PDF document containing all your products which your customers can download)
• Information Pages Unlimited (allows you to add information pages very easily)
• Lightbox (adds lightbox.js to your product image views)
• Auto Thumbnailers (create small thumbnails of your larger product images to save bandwidth / speed page load)

I have not added links to any of the above as they would become out of date very quickly. Instead search the osCommerce contributions section for the latest additions!

ZenCart

Zen Cart is a popular solution as it works more easily out of the box than osCommerce does. The default design used in the installation looks a lot better than that of osCommerce (in my opinion) and it is considered more secure than osCommerce. There are contributions available for Zen Cart, but nowhere near as many as there are for osCommerce. If you want a store thats quick to set up and reliable then you should definately consider it.

Virtue Mart

Ok, earlier on I said osCommerce was my favorite E-Commerce application, but that it shouldnt be. I said that because, in all honesty Virtue Mart should be the hands down winner. The reason I dont favor Virtue Mart is because of the lack of contributions, however, if you compare the ‘live shops’ built with osCommerce, Zen Cart and Virtue Mart there is no contest. Sites built with Virtue Mart are in a different class.

This is because Virtue Mart is not just a ‘shopping cart’. When I first heard this phrase I was confused as to what it meant. The answer is that neither osCommerce or Zen Cart allow you to build a website, they only allow you to deploy an online store.

Virtue Mart allows you to build a professional looking website with an integrated store, if you check out the live stores for Virtue Mart (choose sites with three or more stars) you will see what I am talking about.
These sites look more like websites as opposed to looking like standard E-Commerce sites. This is because VIrtueMart contains a content management system, originally designed for creating websites (as opposed to online stores).

I believe Virtue Mart was originally an integration of Mambo CMS and PHP Shop. Virtue Mart still works with Mambo CMS, but the integrated installer uses Joomla! (if you want to use Mambo it will be a little more work).

The later releases of VirtuMart solve some of the integration problems (integrating CMS with PHP Shop) and now installs far more cleanly.

Unfortunately Virtue Mart currently has very few contributions, but I am sure that will improve as the user community grows (which I am sure it will).

In summary:

• osCommerce – more bells and whistles than you can handle!
• Zen Cart – get up and running quickly and reliably
• Virtue Mart – build something stunning!