While we??™re on the subject of risks and threats, one issue that can substantially damage
your e-commerce site??™s reputation is unreliable order fulfillment. This book shows you how to
construct a web site that offers products, takes customer orders, and communicates those
orders to the owner. An essential part of the process is delivering the products, and to do this,
you need a good logistics network set up before launching your shop. If your store doesn??™t deliver
the goods, customers won??™t come back or refer their friends.
CHAPTER 1 ?– STARTING AN E-COMMERCE SITE 6
?– Tip Webmonkey provides an excellent general e-commerce tutorial, which covers taxation, shipping, and
many of the issues you??™ll face when designing your site, at http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/
e-business/building/tutorials/tutorial3.html. Check this out before you start designing your site.
Designing for Business
Building an e-commerce site requires a significant investment. If you design the site in phases,
you can reduce the initial investment and therefore cut your losses if the idea proves unsuccessful.
You can use the results from an early phase to assess whether it??™s worthwhile to add extra
features and even use revenue from the site to fund future development. If nothing else, planning
to build the site in phases means that you can get your site online and receiving orders much
earlier than if you build every possible feature into the first release.
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