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E-Commerce Tutorial         Lesson 4              Page 1                 by Kevin Hakman

— E-Commerce Tutorial —


    OK. You've waded through your requirements for taxes, payment, security, and shipping (all covered in Lesson 3). You've established how your site will have to work in order to please everybody, from the CEO to the legal department to the design team to the customers. You finally have a clear idea of what needs to be built and have determined what software plug-ins (Taxware, Tandata, etc.) best meet your requirements. Now you're ready to shop around for an e-commerce package to juggle all of this for you. Ideally, you'll find an e-commerce package that's compatible with the tax, payment, security, and shipping solutions you've decided to use. But you may not be so lucky. In that case, it would probably be a good idea to take all of your various requirements for the operation of your site and rank them. What's the most important feature? What features could be compromised? Does the site have to automatically calculate state tax on the fly or can you get away with just saying "applicable state tax will be added"? You don't want to skimp on anything, of course, but you should know where you have room to manuever. That way, if you find a solution that meets all but one of your needs, you'll know if you can live with it or if you'll have to go with your second choice. This kind of planning and flexibility will keep the potentially tricky experience of finding the perfect e-business solution as simple as possible.

    So grab that inch-thick stack of e-commerce advertisements that have been cluttering up your desk for months. Look at those catchy slogans: "E-commerce in a box!" "Instant storefront!" "Try it; you'll like it!" Yikes! Is this software or a new kind of breakfast cereal that works with that other breakfast technology? Let's cut through the hype and break it down real simplelike.

Basically, you have three options:

  • Buy a ready-made solution.
  • Rent space in a network-based e-commerce solution.
  • Build the system from scratch with components and parts.

    It's sort of like buying a car. You could buy a new one and, depending on your budget, get some additional options configured the way you like. But it could get outdated eventually, and you'd have to drop more cash for another one. Or you could lease one for a few years, but then you couldn't paint flames on the side since you don't own it. Or if you really wanted to, you could build your own dream hot rod, but you'd better be a good mechanic to get that fuel-injected machine to run smoothly.

    Let's take a closer look at your options and figure out which will work best for you.

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