Goals: E-commerce sites should be developed in the context of careful analysis of client goals, including market analysis, audience identification, and business plans. Commmercial sites can be categorized as
- Business Card / brochure—publicize company information. Pitfalls include
- Failure to provide important information (what to do? how to contact? where you are?)
- Poor presentation (your site creates your image!)
- Failure to response to site-generated feedback (is anyone checking email from the site?)
- Allowing site to age (if this is old, can I trust it and should I bother with this site?)
- Failing to track access to the site (how do you know the site is justifiable? is anyone visiting it? is it generating any sales?)
- Online Sales—allow customers to place orders online.
- Get the customer to the point of sale as efficiently as possible!
- Does a customer need to physically experience the product to order it?
- Who is this customer and what are they after?
- What questions are they going to ask (and how do we answer them?)?
- How do we earn trust with personal information? What is our reputation? How do we guarantee satisfactions? How do we make credit card information secure?
- How do we make this site easy to use?
- Does our site work on all browsers?
- Service providing—allow services to be provided online (e.g., e-books or music).
- Value adding—provide useful services to existing business, such as fedex or UPS, paypal, online banking, etc.
- Cost-cutting—providing services online to eliminate human expenses (or to provide them from lower cost labor pools in India, etc.).
Risks and Threats: E-commerce can be threatened many ways:
- Crackers—Criminal hackers may try to obtain information, or to destroy it. Counter-measures: Hire honest staff, keep backups, use secure software (and keep it up to date), be alert for targets and weaknesses, and audit with an eye to break-ins.
- Failure to attract business—There are a lot of economic reasons for businesses to fail, even e-businesses.
- Computer hardware failure—server's down? Business is closed! Redundancy, established web hosts, etc. to counter.
- Global competition. Web commerce competes in a different sphere; you are no longer the corner mom and pop store!
- Software errors. Build a good site, make changes carefully, test and test some more. Backup. Good coding practices should reduce software concerns.
- Regulatory climate. You must obey state and federal laws, pay taxes, etc.
- Capacity. Nice problem to have, but are you prepared to handle evolving volume?
Bottom line: Don't go anywhere in the business world, even in the e-business world, without a business plan (which means knowing what you are doing).