[SLUG] The unwritten rules of e-commerce

[Grant Parnell <gripz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Chris Barnes wrote:

> Yeah it's a shame. Their site is nice and easy to navigate, their prices
> aren't too bad but it really cheezed me off when I waited 2 weeks to find
> out my order hadn't been shipped because my credit card was rejected and no
> one told me until I called them 2 weeks later. After I finally got the goods
> it was the wrong stuff. I called them and told them they sent the wrong gear
> but they just told me to send it back at my expense and it will be replaced.
> If they put a little more effort into looking after customers then I might
> consider buying from them again.
> It's a damn shame, that's all I can say.

This sort of thing isn't uncommon. People seem to think at 2 ends of the
spectrum when it comes to E-Commerce. a) Many businesses think it's just
too hard and won't go near it because they have a perfectly good system
where people ring/fax/drop in to place orders. b) Others think that they
know a bit of HTML and someone showed them a bit of php/perl/asp so it
shouldn't be too hard to write a system to take orders over the net.

Neither one seems to realise that the key to a good e-commerce site is
good scalable back-end-infrastructure. Let me re-iterate that "The key to
a good e-commerce site is good scalable back-end-infrastructure" and that
includes good products, procedures, good personel, couriers, internet
providers, programmers, customer service and everything that makes a
normal business successful. The website can be considered a magnification 
of your back-end be it good or bad.

The people in the a) category just need a good e-comm web site design and 
they're laughing. The people in the b) category are going to go nuts 
unless they rapidly deploy a good system after an initial honeymoon 
period when they suddenly come to the realisation they have something that 
can't cope with the workload.

I speak from experience in both a) and b) cases. a) www.ce.com.au (you can 
create a demo account) and b) www.everythinglinux.com.au. In the case of 
everythinglinux we managed to deploy a reasonable system to cope with the 
workload in time but it does drive us nuts sometimes.

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