April 17th, 2007
Web Store Features From Ana Rincon, Your Guide to Online Business / Hosting.
Part 1: Product Management
What features are there to choose from in a Web store, and why would you want each of them? As e-commerce becomes more sophisticated, there are more and more choices for a merchant to make. And of course, each choice comes with a price tag. Here is a list of some common and not-so-common features that you can find in e-commerce software today. Consider which ones are necessary to your business and which ones you can do without before deciding on a software package. This is the first in a series of articles, each dealing with a different category of feature.
Part 1: Product Management
Number of Products : Some e-commerce solutions limit the number of products that you can sell in your store. Make sure the solution you choose can handle not only the number of products you have today, but the capacity for expanding your product lines tomorrow.
Related Products/Cross selling : A good way to increase conversion rates is to suggest additional products to your customers.
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This might include accessories, similar products, warranties, etc. If this fits your business, see that your software makes it easy to do.
Featured Products : Highlighting a product on your homepage can really help promote it. Some e-commerce systems make it easy to feature one or more products by just checking off a box in the product description.
Product Import and Update : Adding one product at a time to your e-commerce solution is inefficient and slow - especially if you already have the product data in electronic format. If you do, and especially if you plan to sell hundreds or thousands of products, choose a solution that can import your data from either a database or spreadsheet.
Inventory Tracking : As products are ordered, an inventory feature will decrease inventory levels for the relevant SKUs. When levels reach a pre-defined quantity, the product status changes and you are notified of the product level deficiency.
Copy Product : If you have products that are very similar to one another, a copy function is useful. With the click of a button, similar products can be quickly added to the online store using the copy product feature.
Hide Products : Hide your products from being viewed online when they are not in stock. This reduces the burden of manually removing or hiding the product from your catalog every time it runs out of stock.
Product Attributes : Consumer goods can often be complex, with a product coming in different sizes, shapes, or colors. Moreover, each attribute (such as color) can have a number of options (such as green, blue, red, etc). Better software will allow an unlimited number of attributes and allow a merchant to define a SKU for each combination.
Pricing and Pictures per SKU. : A merchant may define different prices and assign different images to products that have attributes. When a customer selects a specific combination of options for such a product, the screen will change to show the merchant defined price and image for that specific SKU.
Taxable/Non Taxable Products : For merchants that sell food items and non-food items, it is important to tax the order accordingly. Some software allows the merchant to define a product as either taxable or non-taxable and will calculate the total sales tax per order accordingly.
Write-In-Attributes: Write-In-Attributes are particularly useful for merchants that sell custom products. An example of would be a company selling shirts with monograms. The customer could enter his or her monogram using the write-in-attribute.
Categorization : For the merchant selling hundreds to thousands of products, intuitive categorization of the product line is a must. Some software allows for an unlimited product hierarchy - others limit the number of subcategories.
Assign Products to Multiple Categories : Merchants should make their products as easy as possible to find. Often this means putting one product in multiple categories.
Volume Based Pricing : Do you offer volume or quantity based discounting for your products? A volume-based pricing feature will allow the product's unit price to change according to the quantity selected.
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