Getting Started in e-Commerce

Ready to jump in? Well, the first step is to come up with the answers to the questions your web developer will ask. Which questions? These questions:

1. What's the average price and price range of products in your product line?
2. How many products are you planning to offer on the web?
3. What volume of business do you do now? What do you expect on the web?
4. Do you have photographs of each of your products? If not will you be taking them or do you want your web developers to take them
5. Do you have a written description of each of your products? If not, will you write them or do you want your web developers to write them?

Next, decide what sort of budget you have for a web site. Your web developer can tell you if that budget is realistic for the products you want to support. If not, you may want to make some compromises.

Finally, find a few existing sites that you like, to give your web developer some idea of what kind of site you want.