Getting Started with E-Commerce

One overarching reason why e-commerce sites tend to be more complicated than other kinds of sites is that they need to mirror offline business structures, processes, and practices. Because e-commerce sites are usually database driven they need to be logically organized. This presents a problem. Some companies are not consistently organized in their daily offline business operations. Representing inconsistent sales practices with a database presents many difficulties. In fact, the effort to built e-commerce sites often leads to a company realizing that they have problems in their offline processes. While this can be a good thing, such company-wide reorganization is usually well beyond the scope of a simple e-commerce website project. There are a few specific ways that these kinds of problems commonly present themselves.


An e-commerce site usually starts with an online product catalog. One of the difficulties encountered in building web-based catalogs (for both e-commerce and non-e-commerce catalogs) is in establishing a consistent categorization of products. Inevitably, we encounter products that don't fit into the categories we've established for the site, or products that can fit into several categories. What's worse is when a particular product needs to be broken down into additional sub categories that were not represented in the database's structure. Outside of database development such nuances to a product catalog can be overlooked. But a database driven product catalog requires consistent categorization.


Another example of how daily business practices tend to be unfriendly to logical database structures is pricing. It's amazing how the pricing of many products change based on subtle attributes or conditions. In one instance we developed a site that sold clothing. After the site was built, we discovered that XXXL shirts required $1.00 to be added to the cost of the item. Suddenly the pricing structure we had built for the site no longer worked. This pricing nuance was something sales reps handled manually on a case-by-case basis. They just knew that such orders added a dollar and they added it in by hand. Translating this practice into an online structure required their database to be reconfigured.


Related to pricing is the practice of maintaining unique SKU numbers for every product in a catalog. While this is a common and appropriate business practice, many small retailers do not maintain unique SKUs for every product. This is understandable since doing so can easily turn a product list of 100 products into a list of over 1,200 products. Take a company that sells shoes as an example. A particular shoe might be listed as one product with a single SKU number associated with it. In reality, however, each size of the particular shoe should have its own unique SKU number to differentiate it from other sizes of the same shoe. When we factor in color and width attributes of each shoe, what was originally considered one product could actually require over 100 unique SKUs to represent all combinations of size, width and color. Because of this, many small companies do not maintain unique SKU numbers for all their products. It's much easier for them to simply write down the color and size and manually find the correct product on the shelf. Databases though, need unique numbers for each variation in order to properly process orders. Database catalogs without unique SKUs easily become convoluted making them harder to build and maintain.


We have looked far and wide for the most popular inventory and fulfillment software packages so that we could integrate aspects the NewfangledCMS shopping cart with them. What we have discovered is that there is no dominant product. In fact, it seems that each business niche has its own software solutions. Some retailers builtd their own systems for inventory, fulfillment, tracking, and accounting. Since there are no standard tools, integrating with such systems usually requires significant customization. The result is that most e-commerce sites are detached from the internal databases that companies use for inventory control and fulfillment tasks. This limits the real time nature of inventory status on the web.

Another approach to the problem of integrating inventory, shipping, and fulfillment is to perform all three functions through the e-commerce website itself. There are some out of the box systems on the market that provide tools for this purpose. This approach usually requires the business to rework how they do business offline to match how they do it online - no small effort.