An E-Commerce Outlet Makes Your Product Easy to Buy and Cuts Distribution Costs

It gets easier every day to sell your consumable or low-cost capital item over the Internet. Put these services together to create a low-cost, end-to-end, outsourced e-commerce and fulfillment solution:

Your On-line Store

You can keep your IT, marketing, and accounting people really busy choosing and installing e-commerce software, and piecing together, managing, and troubleshooting an e-commerce system of your own design, or you can go with a hosted service. I recommend the hosted online store application Shopify, which lets you set up an attractive storefront with images and descriptions, manage your inventory, take and track orders, connect to a payment gateway for credit card transactions, and interface automatically to a fulfillment service.

Accepting Payment

If you sell exclusively by taking purchase orders or check payments, you just need to provide the appropriate fill-in spaces on your order form. But consider setting up your store to accept credit card payments. It isn’t too hard, and you’ll save your customer the hassle of getting a P.O. That will reduce your sales cycle by making your product easier to buy. First, set up a merchant account, which you can probably get from the bank you’re already using. Then, add a payment gateway service to handle the interface between your storefront and the merchant account. There are dozens of payment gateway providers, and some of them can handle the merchant banking aspect as well. There are a few different ways to go here, so you’ll want to estimate your sales volume and compare fees.

Fulfillment

You’ve got better things to do than order fulfillment, which is a big hassle. Outsource your cardboard boxes, bubble-wrap, sticky tape, peanuts, labels, postage, border-crossing forms, and more to people who are already really good at all that. Shopify.com interfaces automatically to Fulfillment by Amazon, Shipwire, and Webgistix. Choose one of those services to store and manage your inventory, fulfill orders, provide tracking info to you and your customers, take care of your customers’ questions about fulfillment, and handle returns.

For help setting up your e-commerce operation, contact Matthew Wygant at matthew@wygant.net.

Tagged as: distribution, e-commerce