1. De-bunking the ChannelAdvisor Premium store set up process – a guide for those with little concentration.
2. Breaking down eBay’s changes for real people.
3. How to be the client in a web project (I like this one, no one ever tells the client what they need to do – and you are so important to the development process)

Thanks!

In fact next year I will have more time to devote to my crafty projects and this blog so you will be hearing more from me next year than the one just past.

Hairfreax – new site and restricting handmade hairpiece catalogue. Adding handmade rockabilly Yukata and Kanzashi, as well as funky obi and Japanese/Anime inspired fashion.

Hairfreax eBay – just a few pre-made hairpeices

Keirotech will be partnering with Createyourtemplate and be absorbed into CYT UK – eBay Design, Web Design inc ASPDNSF design, Flash programming, brick to bytes – on-line business integration and business consultancy. New site/info to come.

See you in 2010!

So I am adding two new ‘sides’ to the blog as such.

Reviews:

Just so you know what I am harking on about, this is where you can email me your reviews of any web related shop, service, software and it will be posted on this blog un-edited for all to see. People read this blog and sometimes the people who are responsible for said services. So they can sit back and smile to themselves for a job well done or jump too if they haven’t.
The only catch is your eBay shop/website will have to be included in the review. This is so said companies can address any issues with you and to avoid anonymous rants.

Reviews are so important to readers as it helps with customer confidence and also to avoid pitfalls in their own e-commerce adventures.

Support:

Have a question or quandary? Not quite sure what decision to make? We have done this on and off since the inception of the blog, but if you are stuck or confuzzled about something e-commerce, drop me a line and support will be blogged.

Ask about anything e-commerce related. Humour/comedy is permitted.

*Please note this is not a invitation for free consultancy, you can try your luck but as I am in charge I will select the questions and reviews (probably group the reviews) that appear.

Please email me:

and lets start sorting out the e-commerce world and make it accessible to all.

I quote:

EMAIL & PHONE SUPPORT:
Emergency Email & Phone Support Response Rates: £199 per hour.

What Does This Cover? Urgent critical work that requires a rapid response.
Response Time: 1 working day*

Now, that’s kinda of expensive. If you pay 3 support members £20K a year that is a little over £30 an hour. Plus *costs n profits* lets round that up to £50.
£50 per hour is normally what consultants charge. I charge £15-20 per hour, but that’s because I am new to consulting.

Next:

Standard Ad Hoc Service Support Response Rates: £99 per hour.

What Does This Cover? One-off / un-scheduled work that requires a fast response time.
Response Time: 5 working days*

Five working days is a long time to wait for something costing you £99 per hour. Five days is not fast in the e-commerce world, not in my e-commerce world anyway.

I would probably price this up at around £30 per hour as you would be able to manage the requests better and prioritise clients.

But the next bit takes the biscuit, the whole Marks and Spencer’s Belgian selection…

GENERAL SUPPORT / REPORT A PROBLEM:
If your issue is not urgent and of more of a general nature then why not log a “general” ticket.
Although we can’t guarantee to respond to these tickets, we would really appreciate any comments or suggestions you have.

Every support request is assigned a unique ticket number which you can use to track the progress and responses online.
For your reference we provide complete archives and history of all your support requests.

Which means that for two of my clients any template/store issues will not be resolved to make sure they end up paying for it. My main client is moving away from Frooition design and I am glad because I am the one who has to fix things and contact support charging my £20 per hour……

So to answer my question, what should you charge for support??

What your clients can afford and what you can sensibly justify. If you are choking on support then raise the initial price of the ‘item/service’ in order to cover the labour intensity. Hidden and add on charges that are not fully disclosed or introduced later on a whim get peoples backs up!

I feel sorry for the guys/gals who will be offering Frooition support as their clients will RAPE them for there services, and it won’t be pretty.

P.S Paying someone £199 per hour to configure/programme Parcelforce shipping zones in a php based e-commerce system is well worth the money, if only I could find someone too! Oh wait, it’s me who their paying….should…..charge…more……

What would YOU charge for support? Open comments…

Comments closed now 06/05/2009

Frooition has suffered with redundancies in the last 18 months loosing approximately 7 of its members with Gren making 8.

If Frooition does go under then my 3 clients who use their design will loose it, just as they are about to pay up for the shops upgrade. I already have concerns over the stores working with the European eBay sites.

Worrying times. Looks like I am going to have to focus on creating a compliant store design (which will all be open source) that fits in the new eBay experience and re-work. Templates too.

I do wonder where I am going to get this time from. I suppose I have always known the danger of renting design, it just comes at a busy period when I am clocking up 13 hour days.

Choosing a starting point – Your e-commerce platform.

In general there are three options:

1. A site hosted and created by a company for example Shopify
2. A site created for you but it is hosted on your own server space for example Cubecart
3. An Open Source Shopping Cart such as Oscommerce

Pro’s and Cons:

1. For option one, you don’t have to worry about updates, support is probably available and you never have to worry about complex code, and for most of the time any code. They do have you over a barrel though, so you need to make sure it is a company you can trust and get data out of if you need to leave. They hold your sales information, customer details, design, images etc and they can shut you down. This option is best for the new e-commerce business if you are running it from a non technical point of view.

2. Hosting your own Webstore. Unless you pay said company to do so you will be responsible for security updates and any downtime will be up to your hosting. This option is my favourite for the adventurous. Its all your, the data, the site, but you will come up against it sometimes. There is paid and community support with most systems. You will pay less in subscriptions etc, but all the data is yours and you are in full control.

3. Open source. Its free, usually heavily supported by a community, you have full freedom with your store. The downside is the code editing. Unless you want to pay ( and you might as well choose one of the other options if you are going to do that) you will have to edit the code yourself and learn a lot on the way. It can be a heartache as support is not guaranteed and totally voluntary, but it is also FREE!

Next to consider is the functionality and features you NEED:

Inventory management – Import, export and sort inventory (bulk uploads and updating methods for inventory crucial for large catalogue) You will need to be able to sort, search and filter your inventory.

Image Hosting ( option 1)

Manageable sales data and order processing- Sales and various stages of orders. You will need to also be able to export sales for accounting purposes.

Inventory based shipping AND flat rate shipping – the most basic of shipping methods which can be used to fit a variety of models

Space for Meta Data – somewhere for you to edit your site html title, keywords and description for search engines

Basic statistics – either space for Google Analytics integration or home grown basic statistics

Customer Data – ability to send a newsletter and export customer data

Secure Payments – SSL and a secure payment method for credit cards for example paypal payments pro or cybersource integration.

Paypal – its too big to ignore. make sure you can accept paypal standard transactions with your secure credit card processing.

Multi tier Category Management – you will need sub categories to manage your user experience.

SEF URLs – Text based URLs for your products.

Currency Conversion – a website need to be international so Dollars, Euro’s and Pound Sterling at least.

Inventory Quantity by Attributes – you want drop down attributes on your products for the various options, for example shoes in their various sizes and colour combinations, with quantity attached.

Ability to cname if not hosted on your servers ( option 1) – you need to be able to make sure the site ’seems’ hosted and you have better urls for example http://www.yourdomain.com/redshoes and not http://www.randomcompany.com/yourcompanyname/redshoes or http://yourcompanyname.randomcompany.com/redshoes

Newsletter Function – to send basic marketing emails.

Functions you will WANT but you don’t necessarily need to survive: (next bit coming soon)

This will be updated as the industry changes and I have time to write more. I am not going to list all the available e-commerce solutions as there are plenty of sites to do that. This is the most organised one though:

E-commerce Shopping Cart Solutions Examples

If you need advice on any of these you can contact the authors of the blog (see at the bottom of the page) or myself as I will review any of these systems for you on my blog:

2 things in one. First, it is a 100% free online marketplace. Second it is a free ecommerce website builder.

They profess it will remain free, and the only charge will be for premium listings in premium positions on the site as the sellers discretion.

The feature include:

Unlimited categories
Unlimited products
Up to 10 photos per product
Paypal Support
Google Checkout Support
Money Order, Cashier’s Check, COD
Feedback system
Bulk lister
Tax zones
Fixed shipping per product
Weight-based shipping matrix
Fully editable store texts
Upload category pictures
Set promotional product
Set promotional categories
Color schemes
Order Management
Notify for order by e-mail
Max quantities
Free webstore hosting
Unlimited disk space
Your own URL http://yourname.ecrater.com

Example stores are http://dakotaexchange.ecrater.com/ and http://frames-and-things.ecrater.com/

Opening this one up for discussion sorry!