Custom design e-commerce web site

Sometimes a custom designed e-commerce website is your only choice...

Creating a custom designed e-commerce site can be expensive. In comparison, a do-it-yourself catalog costs just a few hundred dollars to get started. So why would a small business spend thousands, even tens of thousands more to create a custom online catalog?

Like every business decision this one is based on customer requirements, process requirements and return on investment. Let’s look at a few reasons you may want to go with a custom catalog rather than catalog software package like LetMeShop.

Customer Requirements:  While LetMeShop gives you most of the features that Internet shoppers want there are some cases where most is just not enough. One of our customers, for instance, sells equipment repair parts. Most of their customers don’t have the expertise to specify exactly the part they need. A standard listing of parts would be too complicated and the number of returned parts would be high. 

To address this we created an e-commerce site that allows the customer to specify the make, model and other information necessary for the parts technicians at the store to locate the part the customer needs. The customer receives an email with a link to the shopping cart of the e-commerce site. When they get to the site the shopping cart is pre-filled with the parts they need. The customer only has to click the “Buy” button. 

This custom e-commerce solution provided a process that reduced the number of phone calls during peak times and still provides the professional service the customer expects.

Technical Requirements:  Sometimes the technical requirements of your process require a custom solution. Another customer wanted their online catalog to be able to talk to their existing order processing program. This required us to create a custom online product database that matched the data schema of the existing database. We were then able to create a simple import/export process that allowed the two pieces of software to communicate with each other.

Traffic Requirements:  LetMeShop is being used for sites that get tens of millions of hits per month on a shared server. On a dedicated server the software could handle hundreds of millions of hits per month. However, if you expect to receive thousands of millions of hits per month you may have to invest in a more robust catalog solution that can run across multiple servers.

Business Requirements:  This is the one reason for a customer catalog solution that is nearly impossible to over look. If your business processes, products or services require an ordering process that simply will not fit in the product sales mainstream your only choice is a custom e-commerce site. One of our customers sells online training. The process for registering and qualifying for the training is far beyond the standard product/service purchase options. A custom site was the only option.

As you can see there are any number of reasons for spending the money necessary to create a custom e-commerce web site. You can rest assured, however, that we have experience and expertise to help you make these decisions and the technical expertise to make them happen. We can even help you decide if the project has a reasonable expectation of a positive return on investment.

Whether you need a standard, packaged e-commerce site or a site customized to fit your or your customers needs exactly we are here to help.