What Do You Need for an E-commerce Site?

Even though there are plenty of successful e-commerce sites around today, business owners are not quick to take this step, mostly because they have little experience of it and do not know what sales results to expect.

Why would a company build an e-commerce site

Done properly, an e-commerce site lets a company:

• Increase margins, because the cost of e-commerce is considerably lower than the cost of traditional points of sale.
• Gather information about its customers and learn their habits far more easily than in a traditional shop, where that largely depends on what the sales staff do.
• Be available to its customers 24/7, which is usually not possible with a traditional shop.
• Reach far more prospective customers, who are not limited to the town or the country the company is in.

How an e-commerce site works

In our experience, a good many companies are not entirely clear on how an e-commerce site works, how a purchase happens, what follows afterwards and so on. Below you can read how it all fits together:

• A customer arrives at the site and sees all the product categories, along with the products within them.
• All the products, together with their categories, sit in a database on your site.
• The customer picks the products they want and puts them in the cart.
• Once they have chosen everything, the customer decides whether to pay immediately by card or later by some other means.
• The customer enters their details and completes the purchase.
• You produce all the accompanying paperwork, such as the invoice and delivery note, and print the fiscal receipt.
• You deliver the product the customer ordered, or provide the service

What are the biggest challenges with an e-commerce site

Stock control

When companies build an e-commerce site, perhaps the biggest challenge is controlling stock efficiently. Unlike a traditional shop, where all the products are in front of the customer and checking availability is straightforward, that is not the case online, because the stock sits in a warehouse or in one of the physical shops.

This is why, when building a site of this kind, solving stock control properly matters most — and that comes down to efficient communication between the company's business software and the e-commerce site. If there is no real-time synchronisation between the two, someone may order and pay for a product the site is displaying that has in fact already been sold in one of the shops and is no longer in stock.

The daily work of keeping content up to date

If a company wants its e-commerce site to succeed, one of the most important things is having the organisation in place to handle everything it needs. Where the products are concerned, it matters a great deal that the best images and good descriptions are always in place, helping people decide to buy that particular product.

On the sales side, promotions, offers and similar campaigns should be run regularly — bringing new sales in the short term and, over the longer term, loyal customers who come back and buy again. All of this requires staff dedicated to working on the e-commerce site.

What does an e-commerce site need in order to work well

Like any other shop, an e-commerce site requires daily work:

• Tracking the habits of the people who visit the site. You need to analyse regularly where people click when they arrive, how they behave, at what point they leave and so on. All of this data should be used to improve the site continuously, both in terms of the interface (how content and buttons are laid out) and the content itself (descriptions, images and so on).
• Collecting visitors' email addresses lawfully. You need a system for collecting visitors' email addresses so that you can stay in touch with them and, by giving them value consistently, improve the chance that they buy something.
• Ongoing communication with visitors. You need a chat system that lets people ask a question easily and get a quick answer.
• Continuous work on the site's speed. The more products and images you add, the slower the site becomes, so it has to be optimised constantly. Speed matters particularly for your ranking in Google, because the search engine penalises slow sites with a lower rating. Beyond that, how well your social media advertising performs also depends on site speed, because Facebook and Instagram favour sites that load quickly.
• Continuous work on bringing prospective customers to the site. You should regularly produce good content that is not sales material and whose purpose is to bring people to the site. That might be writing blog posts regularly, publishing interesting news and so on. You should also produce content on social media regularly that brings people to the site

How our solution works

Data Design can provide you with a complete e-commerce solution, which covers the following:

• Building a site with every function e-commerce requires
• Designing the site so it is equally easy to use on a mobile phone as on any other device.
• Simple browsing by product category and subcategory.
• The ability to add an unlimited number of images per product.
• The ability to add a short and a detailed product description with all its characteristics.
• The ability to highlight promotions on particular products and special offers.

Implementing a system for managing products, the ordering process and customers (TiramisuERP)

Behind all our e-commerce sites sits TiramisuERP, our own product, which provides a simple system for managing the ordering process and enables things such as automatically producing and sending the customer's invoice, or taking ordered products off stock.

Letting customers pay in different ways

• Payment by debit and credit card
• Payment by PayPal (not available in Montenegro and Serbia)
• Cash on delivery

Implementing the various tools that will help your e-commerce site grow

• Choosing the right name for your e-commerce site.
• Implementing a system for live conversation with visitors (a chat service).
• Promoting the e-commerce site on social media, and SEO.

Beyond that, the following matters a great deal:

• Nurturing the relationship with customers and visitors by regularly sending emails that give them value
• Communicating regularly with customers and prospective customers by sending news of promotions and offers.

Success stories

The e-commerce sites we have built over the past five years now generate more than a million euros a year between them. They cover a range of sectors, and some of the most successful projects are:

• busticket4.me– a system for selling bus tickets online;
• tehnoplus.me– a shop selling technical equipment;
• shop.mikelf.com– a jewellery shop;
• cvjecarahabitat.me – a florist selling flower arrangements;
• enpro.me - ventilation solutions.